Lets say i have a rectangle (plane) that’s scaled to 2x5 units
if i add a texture (512px X 512px) to that rectangular plane it will just stretch and distort
how do i get blender to repeat my texture so it doesn’t get all distorted and stretched?
Loop cut your plane into divisions that match your image - I would suggest changing your render size to 512x512 and then loading the image as a background reference to see it in camera view against your plane. Once you have the plane cut in faces that match the single image, you can unwrap the mesh and match it up to your image in the image editor - make sure to add the texture image to your texture channels in your material, set it to map to ‘uv’.
At this point, you will want to swap over to ‘textured’ draw mode to see the texture in the 3d view.
When you unwrap, just use plain unwrap from the ‘U’ menu and you will see the faces all stacked upon the same square image in the editor - you will then be able to see the image tiled on the faces of your plane.
Hope that helps 
P.S. There might be a simpler method, but I do things the hard way sometimes:)
Hi,
Take a look at the options on this page:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Image_Textures
Especially the Repeat option.