"so YES I was astonished"
 
 And yes, I expected you to be! ;) The trick is both in the mesh and in the UV map.

"uvmap looked aweful"
After the material/texture is decided upon a normal UV map must be created for distribution. The easiest way to do this is to bake the texture in your modeling application.

Here is one more example (created from the unedited picture in the upper right corner)

 I used Cinema 4D but that is not important.