I am learning how to use Blender, I have a already created a few models, however UV mapping isn't exactly clear to me. I have already read several tutorials how to do this.

So my question is, how does UV mapping work? Can it be listed in steps, or is it really that hard?

Any help is really appreciated.

I just finished my first uv map myself. I can not tell you how frustrated it made me in the beggining. It is easyist if you just select one section of you mesh at a time and unpack them individually.

Hear is a tutoral on making a custom sword from scratch that also tells you how to make the uv map. It really helped me with understanding it. Hope it helps.

http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Blender/Custom_Sword

--MNPred

Ahh thanks, off to try that then.

The easiest thing you can do is make sure the model is well planned out from the start. I can't tell you how many times it has come time to UV and I end up doing more work than I should because I didn't create it very UV-friendly.

+ 1. Planning is very important. I'm working on a tileset for FO3, and I've spent as much time crunching numbers as I have modeling.

Blender has a really powerful UV mapper, so there are always going to be several ways to go about doing something. The best thing you can do is spend a whole day learning how to drag and pin verts, how the different types of unwrapping work, etc. I guarantee it will save you hours of tedium down the road.

Being creative about solving texture mapping problems is also important. I created a http://www.truancyfactory.com/images/misc/devTexture.png to make setting UV coordinates easier for my tiles. It has a scale conversion of 256 game units = 1024 pixels (the size of the texture) with a refinement down to 2 gu. Makes it easy to line up textures exactly in Blender using UVs -> Snap to Pixels. Then I can just export to nif and switch the textures in NifSkope. Might seem crazy, but so far it's the easiest way I've found to make textures that tile properly across multiple tiles.

Of course, there's probably an easier way to do it in Blender, but I'm still learning how to use it myself.

Alright thanks guys, I am still quite new to this. It's just that I can model my own items, but when it comes to the UV part, I get quite stuck.