Texture "bunching" on sculpty prims

I've long been puzzled by the way a texture applied to a sculpty prim seems to have a point on a face from which lines radiate and which distorts the texture. (Using Blender 2.49 and the easy export to SL files from Domino Marama, WinXP). I've read and searched the excellent posts on this forum and may have passed over the answer without knowing. I have PaintShopPro XI and GIMP which, I understand, can be used to edit a sculpty map.

Any help in understanding and fixing this problem would be appreciated.

Thanks

Search out the in-world texture tutorials by Robin Wood (http://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Technical/SL-Tuts/SLPages/TextureTuts.html) and work through the stations on texturing. What you're describing is a result of the way the UV map is distorted when applied to a spherical object (or sculpty with spherical stitching).

To mitigate the effect, you will need to use a compensating distortion in the textures you make for such objects -- or, if Blender supports it, do your texture painting/baking in Blender and let it figure out the distortion for you.

Yup. Blender can do the work for you. There are a few ways to "unwrap" the surface for texturizing. This is probably the quickest.
http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/05/12/blender-surface-textures/

... funny thing ... I had these tutorial modules bookmarked and had even glanced over them in the past .. deciding that I wasn't ready for them! Your comments have inspired me to move ahead ... the LOD was a good start and explains a lot!

Thanks, again!

Yeah, texturing sculpties that I had made with stuff like rokuro and tokoroten was always difficult until I started using blender for making sculpties. My jaw dropped when I figured out texture baking and just letting blender do in 30 seconds (perfectly) what hours in photoshop and multiple attempts (and uploads) couldn't begin to touch. Not only can you bake the texture perfectly onto the object, but you can also get great shading by tinkering with different light effects.

Also, another thing that you can do is get great sculpts for table cloths, drapes, and the like by using the cloth modifier and the physics engine to drop a plane onto a collision object to get perfect, natural bends and folds into cloth.

When it comes to Blender, the more you think outside the box, the more interesting stuff you can do. Even if you don't make sculpts, it's useful for texturing (full perm) sculpts that you already have.