Problem textureing Sculpty Prims

I have been building in Sl for a while now and in the Past I have had little problem textureing the SL Prims.. in fact I had always kind of patted myself on the back for such a good job. However recently (since the new Sculpty Prims) I have realized maybe I don't know all that Much after all.
Textureing a Box is easy. SL has given me plenty of tools to turn the texture in whichever direction I desire, squeeze the texture, and offset it to fit onto the prim.
Cylinders are realitively easy to understand also. I have created many many textures in my library that fit all the SL Prims. the Most dificult being the Torus, which I had very little trouble with also.
But Now we have Sculptured Prims. I am finding it very difficult to get my textures to be of any Logical uniformaty.
In some of my art programs I have scripts like Polorize which allows me to twist the Texture around a Cone. But then a cone is uniform and not a Natural shape.
Can anyone direct me to some kind of Tutorial that will teach me the rules to wrap a texture uniformaly around a Sculpty prim?
Thanx in advance

Heh. What Chosen said

Every sculpty is just a square surface, bent in 3D space, the same way spheres are made. Think of it kind of like shrink wrapping. You start with a flat piece of plastic wrap, and then you bend it around the shape of the object you're wrapping. The principle is very simple.

In practice, however, things can seem a bit more complicated. Unless you made the sculpty yourself (which it sounds like you probably haven't been doing), you can't always know precisely how it was bent and twisted into shape. There are lots of possible ways to sculpt just about any shape you could think of. Often you can get a pretty good idea how a shape was made by taking a look at its wire frame, but even that's not always sufficient. For a complex shape, it can be hard visually to trace the lines to see what's really going on.

If you want to see with more obvious precision, I'd suggest you throw a test pattern on it, like the ones in these two threads:




As those two textures are sectionally labeled, you can see exactly where each part of the square canvas falls onto any surface pretty easily. From there, just use the text pattern itself as a template, paint over it to put things where you want them on the canvas, and they'll end up in the right spot on the sculpty.


EDIT: Just to clarify, the pattern in the first link (mine) is divided decimally, and is meant for easy correlation with SL's in-world texture offsets. The one in the second link (by DanilelFox Abernathy) is divided hexidecimally, and will show you precisely where the sculpty vertices are on a sculpty. Either one will work well for figuring out how to do your texturing.

Aw, Aki, you didn't need to erase your post.

I was just about to edit mine to say "Aki's test pattern will work too. Use whichever one you like best."

Very useful template Chosen--excellent reference material.

Thanks Chosen
I will attempt some experiments with those test Paterns.
I have used checker board test textures on my avatar trying to figure where to streach the texture or bunch the texture in certain areas... Lots of work and not sure I realy understood what I was doing..however after 3 months of hard work I finally made a fair skin.
I did not think about that trick for a sculptie
I understand how a texture wraps an object.. but a 2D texture streaches against swollon areas and bunches at tight curves.
What do i do... Use Liquidfy in Photoshop to bunch and streach the texture?
Or is it better to get a 3D program that allows me to paint the texture right on to the 3D form

I do reccomend applications that allow you to paint on the 3d model and make texture bakes which gives you light and shading and possibly material (shininess). I find the texture bake really brings a sculptie to life and compensates for the low resulution of the vertices. I use Zbrush which is about $500. I'm believe there are others that are less expensive.