Possible to move orientation of poles on sculpty?

Not quite sure how to explain this, so...pictures.

The poles on my sculpty go this way (as you can see from the texture):


But I want them to go this way:


Is there anything I can do to the sculpt texture or to the object in Maya to accomplish this, without starting over?

The poles are the top and bottom edges of the sculpt texture, the left and right edges are the seam. So by rotating the texture 90 degrees you will switch them. I'm not sure whether this will turn the sculptie inside out or not. Check in upload preview and if it is wrong you can fix with a horizontal mirror of the sculpt texture.

This probably won't give the result you want though as the new topology will result in some distortions from your original model.

Just tried that...poles are still in the same place, and now there's a hole in the side for some reason. :/

That's the distortion I mentioned. The hole is where the seam now runs through the centre and the two poles are in the middle touching each other (I forgot the texture rotate would put them together). I can't picture what you are trying to get to now, so not sure what else to suggest. I'm guessing a simple rotate of the mesh isn't what you want?

Whinge, can you elaborate on what you are trying to achieve? It looks to me like in the last image, you have switched the poles as requested. (Of course, there's the hole problem, but that's a different issue.) Perhaps what you want is different than what you actually asked for.

You'll need to rebuild the object. There's no way around that. The good news though is it's such a simple shape, it should only take you a minute or so to rebuild it.

As Chosen says.. If the pictures are the actual sculptie you want to do this on, then yes rebuilding is the quickest solution. Though I disagree that there's no way around it. The EAC Unwrap script (Equal Area Cylindrical) that I wrote for Blender would let you change the poles with minimum distortion on this particular sculptie. I didn't mention it as I was assuming this was a sculptie just created to illustrate the problem and it may not be a good option on the real sculptie. And I'm not familiar with Maya so don't know if it has an equivalent to the EAC Unwrap.

That's why I wanted to know more about what the real issue is that you are trying to fix by changing the poles. There may be other options which could fix the real problem. My best guess at the moment is the pole distortion is upsetting an important part of the real sculptie so the plan was to move the poles to a less critical area. In which case using a planar sculptie type could well be the best way to resolve it. I hate to give advice on a guess though..

/me shrugs and waits for further info from Whinge

It depends how you made the object in maya, actually. If you used, for example, a deformation lattice to deform a sphere, you could grab the sphere inside the deformation lattice and turn it until it's oriented right. That should work. See the file I attached, it's the same basic model, created out of a sphere and deformation lattice.. The original, on the left, had the poles in a place that made texturing unreasonably difficult, so I rotated the sphere inside the deformation lattice until the poles where somewhere I liked.

If you made it by, say, lofting curves, no. You're going to have to rebuild.