Just found the link to this topic & think it is a great idea. I have recently joined the ranks of Blender noobs and am looking forward to learning a lot about 3d and ( eventually ) making games. Anyway, heres my little attempt at the hellfire missile.
C&C welcome
The shading on the back looks strange, I guess you used beuty fill or something? if you want it to be flat (but you should probably make a hole there instead)
https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=55417&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=63
and set solid?
Thanx 4 the advice
Now, it’s UV mapped… done over several times, so would be a mess to upload the uv’s here…
but here is some pictures of the missile…!
I’ve also tweaked the shape of it a tiny bit… but nothing to mention
Here is my vain attempt at adding textures… Roll on the texturing tut!
New neo its looking good, everyhting looks nice and sharp 
OH yeah therre are 4 fins not 3…slight problem 
The only thing is, you guys are stressing over tris way to much. Tris are not the devil or anything so dont worry about them no matter what there are tris in everything. Even in your quads there are tris!! The place you have the tris too they are fine, when they are on a flat surface like that you wont see them anyway so dont worry abou them.
Also you might want to up the samples on your ao settings and turn use distances on.
No worries about the textures I will start posting how to unwrap a cylender, later on today. And also how to make sure its not distorting or anything.
NorinMHX - Looking good, just sharpen up the edges some more. And maybe make the fins still a little bit thicker.
JABayne- this m0del wont be for a game, this is just to get us familiar with m0deling and then today UV mapping! By vent I mean the thing you have in the middle of the front fins.
Tjeiken - wow looks like you have an idea of what your doing with UV mapping, so this should be real easy for ya Looks good by the way!
Mike - Heh… Tokk this one as a crash course, because i needed UV mapping on my Supermarine Spitfire
http://biorust.com/index.php?page=tutorial_detail&tutid=85
And to all the other newbs (as myself) in here, that don’t know UV-mapping… try that tutorial… gives you an idea of what it is, and then it’s just logic thinking… =)
OH yeah therre are 4 fins not 3…slight problem
WHOOPS!!! The reference pics kinda confused me, are there 4 fins at the front and the back?
Here’s my attempt:
Cant wait for that unwrappiung tut!
Thanks for thinking of us newbs!!! 
Well, I’m just posting a few pics so you can kindda’ see where I’m at. 
Thanks again.
fmkguy- Nice stuff and welcome
vidar_nelson - Looking good, the only thing is the front fins the round thing you got there isnt there, its just the fins. Im pretty sure 
Ok here it is, the unwraping tute
Basicly unwrapping is just taking your 3d m0del and remaking it flat, so that textures can be slapped on. The problem is this takes quite a while, depending on the m0del you are doing. Once you start unwrapping larger and more complicated things your job gets harder and harder. So one rule I try to keep is not to make one mesh too complicated, as it will most likely result in distortion. Thats one reason why the one mesh m0dels needed working on. So if you followed my advice you should have 4 seperate fins in the back and 4 seperate fins in the front, a main body and a couple different segments, as the body.
So pretty much everything on this m0del is fairly simple and shouldnt really be a problem to unwrap, so lets get to it!
Ok so to start split your main window in 2 (if you work in only one window) and change the right window to the uv editor. I prefer the right side as my uv editor but its up to you where you want it.
Ok now to actually unwrapping the m0del. The way blender unwraps is with this lovely little thing called LSCM. How it works is you select edges and mark them as a seam, then you press U and choose LSCM. So hide everything but the main body of you missile. If you have it seperated into segments just choose one and hide everything but that.
Now we need to decide where to put the seams, this might take some time on some m0dels but for our m0del it is fairly easy, since it is a cylender. When you are placing seams try to choose a place where it wont be seen as much. I chose the bottom of the missile (cylender), since you wont see that in the renders at all. The best way I have found to do the ends of the cylenders is to take, the edges right before it goes flat…yeah a picture would help 
For those of you that extruded the rear in, just treat that like it wasnt going in, keep the seem you cut on the bottom going until you hit the end and then do the same as youdid for the front of it. Here is a pic…
By doing this you will create a flat rectangle and two circles…but to get this go into face edit mode “f” then select the part you just put the seams on and press “u” then LSCM and your set You are going to want to scale and move the UV’s until they are straight, and then scale the main “rectangle” (unwrapped cylinder) so that it is as big as it can go without going out of the light grey area. Here is a picture of my UV’s…I will show how I did the fins in the next post. We will not be using LSCM for those, just to show you another way of doing it, at least when its a flat shape, such as the fin.
hopefully that made sense… :-? If not tell me what is un-understood and I can explain more
yeah you’re right, it’s my reference image that’s wrong.
This one is good tought:
It’s good to know what you are actually modeling 
Thanks for the tute!
sorry for causing the panic over the tri’s
my added texture pic
Note: although i done the main tube and the end cap ok all the other bits just came into uv window in a jumbled mess so i cheated for know by scaleing them down and put them on a similar colour area.
Hello, I am new to blender, and i saw this thread, so i thought i might as well start here
here is what i got so far, I am having troubles with the smoothing, i seem to be getting those hard edges, and i dont know how to fix them, can you please help me?
(oh and also, how do you show the picture, directly in the thread?)
and the wires
So i was wondering, how did you get the fins base small, without gettign the results i am getting?
any help is great 
1337sauce - Hello welcome to blender . I think you loosing the smoothness because your moving some of the verticies that make up the body edges to make the fins thinner. what u need to do is model the fins as seperate items, then altering them will not effect the shape of the tube body.
ohh, so make the body, a seperate object, than the fins? very smart, and then i guess i parent the fins to the body, so when i move the body, it moves the fins too?, making it easier to put in a scene?
Hazza no prob man you were just wondering :)…your texture looks good and the unwrap seems to be good, dont see any distortion on there! I have to find where I saved it but there is a test map that I gots from somehwere to make sure there is no distortion.
1337sauce - do what hazza said, and just so you guys know you dont have to parent the fins to the main body. You can join them to the same mesh, but they arent attached to the body. So heres how ya do it You select the fins then the body, and press ctrl-j and then enter, and its done. Its not actually attached to the body its just a part of it…but not the same element…Also use photobucket…much better and it gives you the code so you can make it on the page not a link.
What button do you push to make the seams, sorry if this is stuped, the last time I tried uv mapping was six months ago.
Ctrl + e -> mark seams
