UV mapping help!

I have done small modding projects over the past year or so, and when I found the free trials of photoshop and 3ds max I jumped on the chance to unleashe my insane imagination.

I have already individually textured units and such and also have moddeled units, so i'm not a complete newbie on the subject. Its just this one thing that bugs me. For some reason, I have never made a model and been able to texture it. I've heard of this 'UV mapping' thing and you texture according to the polygons or something. Ive seen a tutorial of moddeling but not one of making a complete model AND texture, only small references. So I was wondering of someone could shed light on this for me

CHEERS!

UV mapping is a skill you are going to have to lean if you want to do anything game-wise in 3D modelling.

Put simply, there comes a point where just applying materials to a surface won't do what you need. You can't have fine detail such as human faces without using a lot of different materials...and lots of materials means lots of work for games to render your model! This means sllllooooowwww performance. This doesn't matter for art-renders....but it's a killer for something that has to render the whole scene 30 times a second.

So...thats 'why' ....

What you are basically doing is quite simple. You take a single ( or multiple...but for RTW it's a single ) image, and you then apply this to the model to give it colour. If you imagine taking snapshots of the models wireframe from various angles, and then putting these flat shapes onto the texture map, you get a set of flat 2D representations of the model. These have 'co-ordinates' and since X,Y and Z are already taken for 3D...they use U and V !

Now...I don't map in Max coz I don't like it's mapping tools on the version I have...so try something like this:

http://www.tutorialoutpost.com/count/3783 (ignore the multi-texture material...it won't work in RTW)

thanks a BIG bunch!!~:cheers: