Can anyone show me how to do it?

Here is a closeup of a cane I made in Blender, and the UV template I made. This is going to be imported into Poser/Daz Studio and the seams show up even more after exporting.

You can't just unwrap something, slap a texture on it and expect the texture to line up at the seam..lol. It just does not work that way. Even if you filled your texture template with a seamless texture, it will still show a seam where you cut the model to unfold it. You must match the seams at the area that was cut...both sides so that it's a smooth transition across that area when you apply it to your object.

Laurie

Thanks for the quick reply, Laurie. :)

I understand the problem, but my question is what is the way to line those textures up for that smooth trainsition? Is there some best practices method that the pros use that I just haven't run across yet?

It's rather easy if what you want for the texture is a repeating pattern. However, it would take me much too long to explain it to you. I'll look around and see if I can't help you find some tutorials ;).

Laurie

unwrap as 2 halves and overlay them in the uv editor window you will need to scale 1/2 at a time because the back map will need to be inverted and then matched to the front 1/2 if it is symetrical

then in your image editor open the map, and the texture     scale the materials as needed

duplicate it and invert it with the merge line centered as close as possible to the center of the map

merge the material/ texture images and edit to keep close to the map with a small overlap

open it in blender

for smal tweaks use live unwrap to move both front&rear verts to fit the image

as long as you line everything up correctly it will be nearly seamless or you could always use projection paint and unwrap from view to paint directly to the main uvmap

I ended up doing the 2 halves method more or less.

Here is my result.

Now I need to import it into DS/Poser and see how it looks, but so far so good!

Depending on how close up you are going to be rendering the object - a quick and dirty way is to use the "project from view" UV-mapping option, and map the front and the back at the same time. There will still be a seam, two in fact, but not as noticeable as the texture will be mirrored around it.

Another, more time-consuming way, is to scale your object to fill the tiling texture and map the edge vertices along the seam to line up perfectly with the edge of the texture and with each other.  This will require manual moving of vertices. If you set the texture to repeat, it will still line up. Again, this is only suitable for some object shapes where tilint will work.

The method the pros use is to paint directly onto the mesh using a 3d painting tool.  Blender supports this, though the professional standard tool for this is Zbrush.   The technique unbroken-fighter mentions is useful if you want to map a photo or other image that already exists onto the mesh, but if you just want to paint in a more typical fashion, I don't think you need to do projection mapping.  I've never tried it myself, so I'm not clear on the details. There are a fair amount of tutorials on the subject, though.  Here's one on texturing and mapping (you can ignore the part about making a seamless texture since you already know how to do that).  Here's the Blender Cookie texture category, which should give you some solid nuts to bolts instructions to follow.  This Blender Cookie video specifically deals with the texture paint layer add-on, which you might find useful.

Photoshop also supports 3d painting from CS3 or 4 on (can't remember which).  The thing to remember when setting up maps and zones for this is that Photoshop will create separate images for each zone.  Mapping like V4's where there are several zones for one UV mapping and even one UV island will just waste resources. 

Edited to add: As NanetteTredoux mentions, projection texturing will still produce seams.  Just as in 2D, people seem to get rid of them by just painting over them with the clone brush and such.