I currently can't sphere/cylinder map this type of chart/cuts

[micheus]

She looks beautiful. Good work.

it did mean that I'd need to throw away the texture at the end of process and do "convert materials to colors". Which in this particular case is what I wanted to do anyways.

That should create dozens of materials. Doesn't it?

Did you try that code fragment ?

No, I didn't have time for test it. I was updating my dev environment and got some issues. I just fixed it today.

No long cutline needed. Poles very very simple.

It's there in a certain mode - virtually. It's easy to see if we decide to apply a moon texture to it which produce a nice visual result.

By doing that, I noticed you:
1) left the UV information in the mesh;
2) the UV information looks weird since it's boundaries are very irregular and we use to apply a squared or rectangular image that should be entirely mapped;
3) you assigned that information to the Default material, since I just dragged the image to it and got it applied. You must to use a proper material for that - I just heard from dgud once that I shouldn't play with Default materials values;
4) by having the UV map information, I tried to backing the vertex color into a texture and got a big crash. It seems that "garbage" compromised Wings3D operations:

Window: {autouv,2}
Reason: {badarg,[{gl,bindTexture,2,[{file,"gen/gl.erl"},{line,7000}]},
{wpc_autouv,draw_background,1,
[{file,"wpc_autouv.erl"},{line,1950}]},
{wings,'-redraw/2-fun-0-',2,[{file,"wings.erl"},{line,280}]},
{wx,batch,1,[{file,"wx.erl"},{line,180}]},
{wpc_autouv,handle_event,2,
[{file,"wpc_autouv.erl"},{line,572}]},
{wings_wm,handle_event,3,[{file,"wings_wm.erl"},{line,931}]},
{wings_wm,send_event,2,[{file,"wings_wm.erl"},{line,903}]},
{wings_wm,do_dispatch,2,[{file,"wings_wm.erl"},{line,768}]}]}

In the left a weird selection when I did that using the marque option in face mode. Do you see that too? In the right is the strange UV map.

Maybe you should to remove that information. There is a operation for that which code you could to use - with it selected in Body mode -> Vertex Attributes -> Remove UV Coordinates.
After I do this I was able to backing the vertex color to a texture;