Got a question more of personal preference more than anything else. I was wondering, when applying a material that has to fit the contours of the object specifically, what’s the quickest way you’ve found to do this? I’ve generally resorted to only slightly refined forms of trial and error to get it sit right, and I was just wondering if anyone else out there has a better way of getting materials to sit right.
I hope I’m explaining this well enough, if not, give me a shout.
for stills, i usually just go with the tweak and tweak the coords and sizes till its right… but i think uvmapping is best for animations… cause no weird texture distortions becuase every face is assigned specifically instead of wrappping a whole object… i dont know any quick way really, i personally like playing around after ive worked hours on hard models =)
Uvmapping is obviously the tool of choice for fine placement. Although it can be in some circumstances quite fast, it’s never as handy as other means.
The use of the TKEY (in the 3D window, object select pink) to move or resize the texture is certainly fast ; I wish it had a ‘rotate’ option.
For that, the best is using an empty for placement : create one, give it a meaningful name, go in the material buttons (F5) and chose the object coordinates instead of ‘Orco’ and company. In the fiel to the right of Object, write the name of the empty. From now on any way you move, rotate or scale the empty will reflect on the texture placement.
Don’t forget that the choice of projection mode for image_map is important in this case.
Oh, well, you could vertex paint : that’s precise if you want it to be. 
know of any really good UVmapping tuts?
IngieBee has done a great job for bringing some Blender tuts back alive. There is one about UV texturing, which seems to be quite decent:
There are two in fact one easy to find called something like ‘Uvmapping’ and another one called ‘Game Texturing’ which is good even if you’re not doing games.
excellent! Many thanks, this is a great site