Sculptured Shiny Red Tank

So after half a day of experimenting I was ready to attempt something with these new sculptured prims.. The purple bike has a normal sphere for it's tank, the red tank is the sculptured prim replacement made in Blender.

Very cool, What program did you use? How long did it take you?

I used Blender. Basically took me all day, but most of that was figuring out the best way to do the mesh so the automatic mesh closing worked in a predictable fashion. I ended up using a plane mesh subdivided ( keys W2 ) 30 times. The unwrap feature in blender then generates an almost correct texture map. Just mirror the UVs on X ( keys M1 ) and it's ready to use. I then created a material that mapped the mesh's orco co-ordinates onto the red green blue channels of a texture.

The X edges of the plane gets each of the 32 faces merged by SL to join the edges along the line. The poles at the Y edge get a face added to each three vertices at that pole.

(.)________(.)

A piece kinda like that gets added, so ".)" are the joined up poles on the Y edges of the mesh "______" is the strip of faces created by joining the X edges of your mesh.

So as long as you position the X edges close together and each Y edge in a circle of about 1 face diameter, the ends will look pretty smooth when closed. Or if like I had here, you have an underside that won't show, you can be pretty rough with the ends positions and put them where they are hidden in the build.

Now I have the technique figured out the next one is just a case of shaping the mesh and baking the sculpt texture. A much quicker process