So I bought a tutorial book that gave an extremely detailed walkthrough of everything Blender 2.5 could do, from the very basics all the way to complex animation. I finished the 1st portion which and believed that I could now succeed in finishing a tutorial I had once found when first becoming interested in 3D modeling.So I'm following along and everything is going great, had some minor missteps where I made the hilt, handle or blade too narrow and came up with an unrealistic flimsy shape and at points tried to get fancy and deviate from the guide but ended up just going back to the barebone's sword that the guide detailed. Now onto the UV Mapping, I start to pick rows, 1st row, 2nd row and 3rd row of faces all appear and line up as expected, however when I go to select the fourth face of the sword everything turns into a cluster[censored] over on the UV Mapping side of the screen and the once nicely unwrapped faces become a mess of vertices and edges that I cannot sort out and make it appear as though I tried to texture a 2D object. I'm not sure how to explain it other than that its just a hot mess.

Could anyone point out any potential flaws and give me some advice on creating a hilt that will allow for a cleanly shaped sword?

Ill link the tutorial that I'm following, the specific portion is under the UV Mapping section........... http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Blender/Custom_Sword#Important_Preliminaries:_Necessary_Tools

So please any help or pointers would be greatly appreciated! Cheers

I can't help with your problem, but mind linking to the book you're using? I'm trying to learn to use Blender as well, and it seems like it would be a pretty big help.

I'm not sure I entirely get what you're trying to say here, so forgive me if I beat about the bush a bit (and act like we're all using 2.49b, which shouldn't be too dissimilar). It does sound like it could be a few things:

- You may have messed up and/or duplicate vertices. In Edit mode, tap A a time or two to select everything, tap W, select Remove Doubles. May help.

- If everything went all crazy and grey over in your UV window it could be you don't have the texture properly applied to the faces. If some of your faces are textured and some aren't, this is a sure sign. Select one of the untextured faces, then A to select all, then make sure to choose a texture over in the UV window. May clear things up.

- As a side note, the CS wiki tutorial is wrong: You can use all the .dds files you want without issue. I'll get back to this in a sec, but that tutorial is pretty old and should be taken with several grains of salt.

- I'm heavily unconvinced by the UV mapping advice given there. There's no particular reason, assuming you know how to mark seams, that unwrap isn't a superior method for this kind of work. More on that in a sec too.

You may want a different tutorial. http://tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?app=tutorials&cat=15 has a few, and I've written my own weapon tutorial in two parts http://dementedrabbits.net/wordpress/2010/08/creating-oblivion-weaponry-in-blender-part-1/ and http://dementedrabbits.net/wordpress/2010/08/creating-oblivion-weaponry-in-blender-part-2/. Specifically regarding UV mapping, I have a tutorial http://dementedrabbits.net/wordpress/2010/05/creating-dice-in-blender/ that should explain marking seams and unwrapping (the second part of the weapon tutorial also covers this, but start here). You'll also want to look into how UV face layouts work, covered http://dementedrabbits.net/wordpress/2010/05/using-uv-face-layouts-to-texture-with-blender-and-gimp/. Other random and non-topical tutorials http://afkmods.iguanadons.net/index.php?a=topic&t=64.

Were it me, I'd go through the dice tutorial I linked first just to get the concepts, then go on to weapons. I will say that once you get this first one down, the process becomes a whole lot easier.

Lastly, a few ruminations on seam marking and unwrapping. This will make a whole lot more sense once you've done some reading, but:

- The tip to marking seams is to visualize your object like one of those fold-up paper houses, the ones where all the walls are connected by fold lines, and there are glue tabs and things. You pretty much want to make your object look like that. On a sword, for instance, you'll want to mark off the entire guard and make it its own thing, maybe part of the hilt, too. It helps to take a few vanilla textures and see how they did it to get a feel for things.

- When unwrapping, project from face works really well from top/side/front view if your object doesn't have a lot of vertical to deal with. Good for blades and things, but not square beams or the like. If you've got a good candidate for it, once you've unwrapped you shouldn't need to do much except maybe scale (s key in the UV window) or rotate (r key).

- Otherwise, your go to command should be unwrap. Things will come out kind of skewed, and you'll probably need to wrestle with it some and drag vertices all over the place. One trick for doing that is to keep in mind that Blender likes numbers really well. Select a vertex in the UV window, start dragging, then hit X or Y and a number and then enter, and your vertex will move precisely a number of pixels equal to whatever you typed. You can get really good precision that way if you decide you need it (good for handles and walls and things).

Good luck. Hope this helps.

http://www.amazon.com/Character-Development-Blender-Jonathan-Williamson/dp/1435456254- however im using the CS Wiki Tutorial and now the tutorial linked above to focus on 2.49b and Oblvion specific models.

Alright well i give up, of the 4 sided sword only 4 sides will unwrap correctly, when I attempt to unwrap the 4th side the whole map collapses and sort of rewraps the layout without any way of getting it back, i was able to apply an image that wrapped around the whole sword so it means that the mapping is registering correctly but it just looks terrible and may confuse me down the road.

Just a hint: If you only describe your actions and "things" that happen, you may wait for more accurate answers for days or even longer until someone will eventually hit the nail. But if you post some pictures showing what's going on out there or even upload your file and give a link to it for inspection then you will receive hints and solution much quicker. That's how things work usually here ;]

Okay ill work on it

http://www.flickr.com/photos/58887748@N08/6133829973/in/photostream#/photos/58887748@N08/6133829973/in/photostream/lightbox/- Kinda tough to see but essentially this is after I have selected all of the edges and marked the seams, then selected the faces and then unwrapped them. All of the faces seem to be strung together with the exception of the pieces of the blade which is the cluster of pieces above the jumbled mess.

That looks like quite a normal behavior to me :] Especially while you're selecting the whole of complex mesh and use unwrap function.
The point is that you're expecting to achieve a good final result by just a few clicks - and this won't work such way :]
If you want to make a decent UV maps for easy texturing (at least as good as original ones) then you need to perform various unwrap methods on different parts of the mesh separately.
For instance - select only the blade part, switch to the top view (7 on numpad) and in edit mode press U and select Project from View - then you will have a decent shape of blade in UV map editor. Of course you need to resize it and better position on area of UV map later.
And then you can play with other parts like handle (making seems should be helpful here, but you may want not to use that project from view option this time but play with simple unwrap - where a shape of generated UV map will be depended on where you marked the seems). And here once again the output won't be perfect, so some time for work to align those vertices in UV editor will be required.
Well, no one said that making a good UV map for a bit more complex objects is a "one touch button process" ;] It just requires some practice and a bit of time of messing with things first if you're quite new to this.

Hard to tell from here (I'd need to see a zoomed in shot of your edit window), but it looks sort of like you've got way too many seams marked. For the blade, you pretty much only want to mark the seam between the blade and the edge. If you built the entire sword instead of just half the sword, you'll also need to mark a seam all the way around the cutting edge. Do something similar for the guard and the hilt.

Well the blade unwrapped and projected from view looks good, ive managed to match em up vertex to vertex the way they did a lot of the original textures. The problem is I cannot seem to keep the orientation the same when I unwrap the hilt/handle, its sends them off into their individual faces and doesnt keep the blade projected from view, which I'm assuming is normal behavior. Really what I would like to have happen is to be able to do each map separately so that it doesn't re-unwrap the blade but I dont think thats going to happen

Well somehow im doing it, not really sure how, but its working so im not going to complain


Edit: I discovered my error, I can't really explain it but I can say that I worked it out and it was a result of me trying to cut corners.....thanks