How would I bend some text so that it exactly follows the outside of a cylinder? It doesnt have to go all the way around the cylinder, but I can’t figure out how to make sure that the sizing is exact.

3ds Max Design 2012/Maya 2012
Intel Core i7 3.07 GHz, 8gb RAM
AMD Radeon HD 6950
Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 x64

I’d use the bend modifier. 

Or the path deform modifier.  You could detach/clone a loop from your cylinder and convert it to an editable spline and then use this as a path.

I’ll try path deform. I have been using bend, and it works okay, but it requires a lot of tweaking and never gets it absolutely perfect.

EDIT: I tried path deform, but it doesnt seem to work with text objects (I extruded the text a bit then applied the path deform to a spline I took from the cylinder)

I then tried path deform on a thin, long box object, and I realized that it wasn’t deforming to the same shape as the spline, but more like a similar object where the curves were at the right place but in random directions and amounts. its strange.

3ds Max Design 2012/Maya 2012
Intel Core i7 3.07 GHz, 8gb RAM
AMD Radeon HD 6950
Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 x64

How about making a bitmap of your text and using it in a material applied as a decal?

Porter Wayfare
Max Design 2009/2010, 32 Bit
Acer 1710, Pentium 4, 3.00GHz, 1GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5700, Windows XP

I suspect your cylinder has too few sides. Increasing the number of sides will cause the cylinder to more closely approximate a perfect circle, which is what the bend is trying to do. Make sure the pivot point of the text is at the back of the text and is precisely on an edge then the bend will be as perfect as you can make it.

Max 4.2 through 2013.
XP-64 (SP2)
NVidia 9800GTX-512 (Driver 266.58).
Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz, 8Gb Ram, DX9.0c.

Text as it comes, and then extruded doesn’t always deform well because of it’s topology. It won’t have a neatly subdivided face. Straight lined characters like T, L or E (depending on font) will have few vertices and won’t bend well. Curved letters like S or C will have loads of vertices, but it makes the face from long skinny triangles, so that can make for an ugly deformation too.
To get a nice geometry, you may have to actually poly model the letters, it’s more work I know, but will work better if properly done.
Quick cheat, use Garment Maker to make the text object into an evenly subdivided surface, then Shell to make it solid. The downside to this is the random Tri mesh from garment maker may not always give the desired look either in some cases, but worth a try.
A nice quad mesh with sensible edge loops is what you want ideally. Then you can bend, twist, path deform or whatever, and subdivide further with Turbosmooth if you need to.

Like Samab said text as it comes is a bit wonkey when you turn it into a 3d object, however if you follow this tutorial “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0L07rTmMGI” before trying to bend it around your cylinder you might be able to get the look you’re going for.  Now if you have to worry about your poly count don’t bother trying this technique, but I’d still check the tutorial because it might give you an idea on how to make your text more workable without having to model it by hand.