Can Lightwave make high quality Sculpties?

Hi there, Ive been playing around with sculpts for a bit using Lightwave 3d to generate the maps following Patchouli Woollahra's wonderful tutorial and then upload, Ive tried both lossless settings and I still find the surfaces of my sculpts to be warbled and uneven no matter how clean the original 3d mesh looks like.
Anyone have any ideas or perhaps someone that can tell me de facto that Lightwave will not generate the high quality sculpts I see out there on the grid so that I can try some other method.
thanks in advance for any info, ive been banging my head against the wall on this a while and am hoping to turn a new page in my sculptie learning story!

One thing to keep in mind is that the Lightwave sculptie authoring process involves surface approximation. The shader you create and render out does not take into account where you have placed vertices during modeling, it just arbitrarily samples surface data at regular intervals. This isn't that big of a deal, in fact that's how the "official" sculptie MEL script from LL does it. It just means that you might lose some of the crispness on your original mesh to the process.

Not a lot of folks seem to use Lightwave for sculptie creation, so there's not many troubleshooting posts in this forum (as far as I've seen anyway). I'll start with some general stuff. What image format are you rendering out your maps to for upload? Can you post an image that shows the original mesh and the "warbled' one so we can compare?

the issue im having is the final sculpted prim looking like I had jittered the points slightly, my curved surfaces never have clean lines and flat areas aren't flat at all.
I placed an image at: http://www.umf.net/misc/sculpt_issue.jpg to show both the mesh and then the sculpt in SL, I turned on reflective surface to show the irregularity, I have tried uploading as a .bmp and .tga and get the same results. I even tried "freezing" the mesh after shaping it and creating a sculpt map from that which seems to get things a little smoother but still warbled.
Just as a test, I grabbed the trial version of Maya and ran through a tutorial and the sculpt I exported on my first try was flawless.. smooth curves, no warbling whatsoever, not even around the seam points which in the Lightwave created is where the warbling is the worst.
Im really hoping im just doing something wrong as the thought of learning a new 3d app when im already fairly fluent on Lightwave is a disheartening one to say the least.

Are you uploading the images using a lossless loader? That is a common cause of sculptie jitter. It sounds like you are if the Maya sculpts came in all nice.

Another issue can be renderer color management schemes. 3ds Max has a true color setting that will play havoc with map generation if not turned off. I have no idea if Lightwave would do anything similar.

Your pole looks like you might be using a spherical UV map. If your UV's have a sawtooth pattern at the polar edges then you will get a pronounced warping effect. The way to get around that is to use cylinder geometry and delete the caps then pinch the boarders of the openings closed. There's also a Photoshop trick involving using Flaming Pear's Solidify A filter from their freebe pack of filters on their site. With Maya the UV for NURBS spheres is automatically a square patch due to the nature of the topology.