Wow, this one a real brain teaser !!! I couldn't get any solution to work efficiently with UVmapping ... Though i will make some other tries . I'd be curious to know how other softs would do this ... But there is a simple solution that works in every case when you don't want any distortion : procedural shaders ! You can get some very complicated patterns this way, like on the pic i show, but if you really have to use a texture-map, then you're out :( litst