Spring RTS Engine

So I got Wings 3D the other day and started playing around with it, in the hopes that I could perhaps makes some units for a mod or two. I've taken to it pretty well, but one thing has utterly stumped me: texturing. I've UV mapped the model I want to texture, and fiddled with every single option in upspring, but nothing's clicking. I've read every help file, tutorial, and forum discussion I can find, to no avail. It's becoming somewhat frustrating, so if someone could kindly point out what in the frack I'm supposed to be doing, it would be greatly appreciated.

You take the UV map, put it into a painting program and start painting stuff.

....Well. I feel smart now.

I was thinking it was Upspring itself that put the textures on. Well, thanks for the help.

KDR_11k wrote:You take the UV map, put it into a painting program and start painting stuff.

It is this easy? I would start making models now if I didnt sucked so much at modeling and texturizing...

So, just so I'm clear on this, I can take the UV map, open it in Gimp, and then either paint my own texture or overlay an existing one, save it, and the model will be textured? Because I did just that, and nothing changed. Furthermore, there's also the fact that wings is now refusing to allow me to create uv maps anymore. Top that off with the fact that I've never made a texture in my life and have all the artistic sill of a baked potato, and I'm thoroughly screwed.

If some one could give me just the basic, rudimentary steps of the process involved here, it would be of infinite help to me.

After you save it you have to tell the 3d program where to look for the texture. In Upspring that's on the Mapping tab.

There's a tutorial in the wiki by Das Bruce telling you what to do.
Also this might be interesting.

One last question and I'm out of your hair.

Wings will no longer let me uvmap the model as a whole. Will it work alright to uv/texture the parts individually, or is there any way to get the total uvmapping to work again?

Group - read combine, avaiilable in the context menu in object mode - all parts together, then edit the UV map.

No this won't work, there's only one diffuse texture map available and all parts need to be on it.
You can seperate the parts later if you need to move or deform stuff, though I don't advise deforming as it will deform the texture unless you redo the UV map for these parts.

That's normally what I do....combine all the parts into a single object, uv map, force segment, etc. And that was working fine for awhile, but lately it refuses to. It won't save the uv map to file, and when you try to look at it in the outliner, it just brings up a blank window.

EDIT: Just a thought...could the poly count have anything to do with it? Because while atempting to make the map, there seems to be just a tad of overlap in some areas, and the problems didn't surface until after I had made some modifications to the model. Also, if the model and various parts therein had already been mapped several times before, could that cause problems?

The faster I can get this problem solved the happier I'll be... this thing is literally begging to be textured and animated, and not being able to make any progress on this little project is frustrating in the extreme.