Blender DIstortion?

Ok..So ive figured just about everything out as far as basic sculptie creation goes (see my previous thread "A Blender question" but now Im having a major issue thats making my brain cramp.

Regardless of the prim I design, when I paint the texture, like 90% of it is bunched up into one part of the UV image, resulting in some majorly distorted images. A drum becomes a wedge..that sort of thing. What am I doing wrong??

Make sure the UV map *points* that represent the mesh are well spaced. If they are not, Blender makes draws an error that causes a section of the sculpt texture which represents the mesh to be white or black. Naturally, a tiny white or black section amongst other colors will cause the mesh to do odd things in SecondLife.

It takes a bit of playing around with it.. but once you get a mesh that works with the general shape and resolution you need. Save it, it'll generally work with similar shapes so long as the faces don't overlap and the shape is relatively the same. a hack that's worked for me is actually moving the vertexes in the UV map by selecting them with the right mouse button then hitting the GKEY to grab them. Move the mouse and once you have it/them placed where you want them, hit the LMB button to finalize the vertex movement.

You will need to re-bake the UV texture once you've done this.

I've had this problem crop up when using multires (great way to get good LOD). multires is pretty new in blender and seems to have a bug or two lurking to catch you out. I find when it does the bunched up thing, some of the faces get rotated too which really messes things up.

Sometimes just closing Blender and reopening the file is enough to get the proper UV co-ordinates back. Others, you may find a level of the LOD still has the correct map, so changing the pin setting on the multires to that level will let you get a working UV map.

I'm still trying to identify exactly what circumstances cause it, but generally speaking going to the lowest mesh level before baking seems to avoid the problem.

I check the UV Map and save regularly now, just in case.

Worst case scenario is you need to redo the UV map.

It's not just SL that has teething problems with new features