I'll hope people can follow basic commands.

Make sure you have advanced mode on.

Go to Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Find Advanced Menus -> Click said box if not already clicked.

Spawn a cube.

Select cube.

Right Click.

Click UV Mapping

A new camera will open, with your cube in it.
Okay, now we come to a hard part (On harder models).

We can UV Map this in different ways, I'll make several examples.

Select all of the lines except the bottom ones.



Now select "Mark Edges for Cut," and then deselect the lines.



Now right click and click "Continue" and then click "Unfolding."

You should get this:



This is your UV map. Technically this would be where the tutorial ends.

But that makes me feel lazy, so let's keep going.

So. What do you do now? You make it easier to texture.

Deselect the small square in the top left, but make sure you kept the others selected.

Move them to the left, then rotate them until they make "perfect" lines.

Or, take one line and use "chart to x/y" to align the line along an axis.

Like so:



Now, make sure you have everything selected. Right click and find "Create Texture" at the bottom of the menu. When you click on this,
you will see this menu:



Except, yours has a lot more passes, click on "Delete Unused Pass" and it'll solve your problem.

Click here:



And then select color, and it should default to white, if not.. You should know how to make sure it does.. (PS: Click on the white square)

Click OK, and then click the other OK. Deselect your maps and you should have this:



This is your texture. You need to be able to edit it though, right?

So, select Window->Outliner, at the top:



And now, find cube1_auv:



Left click, then right click and "Make External" should be an option there.



Now save it as cube1_auv.png.

Png is a very versatile image format. As you can see from my screenshots, JPG is not very reliable unless you have full quality, and even then, it does not support alpha channels, like a PNG does.

NOTE: THE NAME OF THE TEXTURE INSIDE AND OUTSIDE MUST STAY THE SAME! DO NOT CHANGE THE NAME OF THE TEXTURE YOU JUST MADE EXTERNAL OR IT WILL NOT SHOW UP FOR YOUR MODEL.

Okay. Find your texture, it may have saved in a folder that you last edited, or in Wings3D's main folder.

Open it up in your best or favorite application for texturing, I would suggest GIMP, if you don't already have Photoshop.

Here it is after opening it:



Any changes you make will be seen on the corresponding faces on your model.

Draw something, and then go to Wings3D, select cube1_auv, and click refresh. If you saved it in GIMP or PS, it will now appear on your cube.

An example:



And it corresponds, like so.



NOTE: I HAD TO ROTATE THE SAME THING SEVERAL TIMES. THIS IS BECAUSE I MAPPED IT LIKE I DID.

Example:



So, the bottom is the middle, and all the edges on the inside are all the edges at the bottom, and the edges at the outside are the edges at the top. Make sense? If not, I am not being clear enough.

Well, that about sums it up. Just click "Make Internal" in Outliner, and then you can even delete the outside texture. Have fun, hope I helped somebody...

yay another tutorial ^_^

Thanks this is exactly what I needed! Now I can make my models, thanks for the extra included stuff as well, such as how to export the texture, something that I desperately needed.

Uh now exactly how do we go about with slightly harder model, say a basic tank, do I just select the top edges, or do I just look at it and kinda figure out how I want it to unfold?

What is this I hear about overlapping duplicate UV maps, how does that work, do you just drag the uvmaps over top each other? What about scaling, is that possible as well, to cram more uv maps together? Because I want to keep a 512 x 512 uv map, and have in the upper limit of 10 objects. Wait, can I just make a 512 x 512 uvmap and scale my uv map down and fit 6 objects onto one panel?

rather then hand rotate, select an edge then right click, choose rotate_. Chart to y and watch it rotate the box for you.

i tried this with my model, exported with sucess, texture worked on Wings, but it simply does not work on UPSPRING, i dont know what is wrong, i did the export for uv, then uvmapped, textured, saved and did import from uv and built the .dds texture file, i dont know what is wrong

stop using dds, despite what some people on this forum will tell you you do not need to do that. We also need to know what is wrong to further help you.

it simply do not load the texture, or loads without my modifications

so you set it to s30 texture and then choose the textures and nothing happens? care to upload the files for us?

s3o...

You could've mirrored the side faces.

It was a basic tut to get someone started... that can be covered in tut 2.

Very helpfull for a beginer. Saves me doing one!

aGorm

smoth, could you pm me with your msn?

THEN PAY WITH YOUR BLOOD!!!!

No, but really, this tutorial helped me, newb of all modding, learn to UVmap easily, and without spending $700 for 3D Studio Max, or $600 for fireworks, or spending infinity learning to use GIMP, just pop it into paint, swipe and go, it ain't no Game Maker pant editor, but it's good enough.

AHHHHH, I unwrapped my Robotix Commander and got 2 elephants weird. Actually even weirder is that it comes form the commanders ARM PIT zone.

you see, my "draw options" box doesnt look lke that, why?

picture of what it does look like please.

magus, I do not give out my msn.

Mine looks like this

*Shrugs*

Might be that I have development version >.>

Thanks, I just downloaded the development version and it works

I hope you make more of these

will this mean that it will have cool reflections?? or do we deal with that in the alpha channel?

s3o units use two textures.

Reflections are handled via texture 2.

texture 2 does the following

red=glowmap
green = reflection
alpha=alpha.

right

so

thats done in upspring?