Notice
I tried to make this tutorial as universal as possible, so I will not go into details such as butons'names, or shortcut keys. I suppose you know your software or you have the manual near you. It could be possible that some commands are not in the software you are using. In that case I'm sorry. To be sure you don't loose your time, I suggest you to firstly read the tutorial, and execute the exercise after. Furthermore it will help you to understand it globally.

1. Get an object
2. Break it apart
3. Arrange it
4. Take a shot
5. Make a texture
6. Apply texture
7. transfert UV data

1. Get an object
Yeah, the first step, believe it not or is to get a model to texture. I suggest you to get a object low-poly enough to start with. If you don't have any, you can quickly model something.

Here is the spiky turtle i'll use for this tutorial.

2. Break it apart
Now go in face mode, polygon mode or whatever it is called in your 3D software. What we'll do is quite simple, but can be long and complex with some models. We will separate our mesh in different pieces. In general you'll separate you model in front/back sections, sometimes top/bottom, and sometimes both. But be careful! separating the mesh this way will affect the look of the smoothing. In fact it will give the same effect as smoothing groups. Try to use it at your advantage. For example, a dice will look better if each face are separated, so the edges are not smoothed. The same thing happens with sword blades.
3. Arrange it
Now we'll make a second copy of our model and hide it. From this point, we won't be allowed to add or remove vertices anymore, because the two meshes must keep the same vertices and face info. All we'll be allowed to modify is the vertices position.

Go in top or front view, depending of your main separation. Move and rotate each face group so that they don't intersect each other. We will use it to gererate our UV map later. If your model have several similar parts (like the legs and spikes of my turtle) you will want to use the same texture for them, so put these groups overlapping each other.

I suggest you to deform curves so that you have unwrapped your object.

Make sure you use a square section and that you use the more pixels possible. Each pixels cost us some memory, so we are better using them ;) But be careful, always let a little distace between groups, becasue mip mapping and filtering will blur the image and we don't want the color of a group to bleed on another group.

4. Take a shot
Make a render of you scene or take a screenshot. You'll use it in you favorite painting program to make your texture.

5. Make a texture
This is not a texture tutorial so I won't explain you how to make a texture, but with your UV shot saved in a file, it should be easy to make one.

6. Apply texture
Merely load your texture, and apply it as planar or flat, depending on the software. Adjust it tp fit your objects.

Now we will convert this planar mapping to UVW mapping. Each 3D softwares have command to do this, most of the time in a texture menu.

7. transfert UV data
Now you have your object, UVW mapped and textured, but there is problem, you model is greatly deformed. But you remember we made a copy of it previously ? Now unhide it. Here is the tricky part. We will take the UVW data and copy it the copy of our object. In Cinema4D is is quite straightforward, as we only drag the UVW icone to the object. But in other software is can be harder, and sometimes impossible. In 3DS Max, all we have to do is save the UVW map, and load it after in the other object's UVW properties. If you discover methods for other software (Lightwave/Maya/etc) or you discover it is not possible, please email me and i'll add it to this tutorial.

If somewhere I'm wrong, or if you have additionnal information to add to this tutorial, please email me and I'll be happy to add or correct the info.

BarZoule,
July 2002