I totally adore Photoshop. With just Gradients and Curves I can do beautiful things. A lot of these tricks apply to making sculptie maps. Colour me happy.
Unfortunately, there is a problem with using nothing but integers in the entire pipeline. Lumpiness. Ugh. I was resorting to other softs for smoother results. Very convoluted for something as simple as latheing. I can lathe using stock PS tools, but the results were very unsatisfying and very unsmooth.
Tired of 3rd party hackery, I finally took it to FM and hacked out a very simple lather - and I do mean *very simple*. My results aren't baby butt smooth, but acceptable once I get them in-world and textured. Definitely much better than what I was getting using stock tools. And now I don't have to hack with other softs. Colour me happy again.
Normally I keep little things like this in code form and load them up as needed, but thought some of y'all might have some fun dinking around with it.
Tested it with various document sizes and it worked like a charm. I even tested it with oblong 128x64 and it performed. Kudos.
Once you have your sculptie map, it's just a matter of doing whatever for seams and stitching.
I have absolutely zero plans to take this further. I wouldn't even know how to take this further.