Problem with UV mapping

Artistic Support Materials and Textures
1

Hello,

I will make it abundantly clear first of all that I am a complete novice when it comes to Blender, in fact I have only been using it for a couple of days. I aim to use my models in the Oblivion game, so I’m working with meshes and importing/exporting the .nif file format.

After editing the mesh of an existing model quite considerably, I have come up with something I like the look of:

http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/9176/swordobjectpp2.jpg

So I go to UV map it so I can get on the way to texturing. My aim is to have both sides of the blade overlapping (as they will use the same texture both sides) and with a bit of effort I manage this. As you can see when I’m using the faceselecting, the blade is a different colour to the hilt/handle/pommel, which is odd but at the time it didn’t bother me:

http://img523.imageshack.us/img523/4136/uv…tcolourswl3.jpg

After mapping my blade, I start work on the hilt, specifically wanting to map the curved peice that runs up part of the blade. My aim was to have both sides overlap as again, I was planning to use the same texture both sides. However, things go terribly and perhaps this blackness is creating all sorts of problems, because when I select a face from the area I want to map, the UV editor goes haywire and zooms me right out:

http://img267.imageshack.us/img267/4761/zoomedoutwhyjy9.jpg

After zooming back in, the grid is gone and it’s just black everywhere:

http://img523.imageshack.us/img523/6319/zo…lackgriddy1.jpg

I really don’t know why but like I say, I have no experience with Blender at all. All I can think of is that to make the blade, I created a new object (started off as a plane, extruded it etc into a blade) and then merged it with the handle. I made sure all the normals were pointing out.

So if anyone can cure my problem and give me some tips/advice when it comes to UV mapping, I’d be very greatful. I didn’t think it would be particulalry hard, just selecting the faces to unwrap and organising them on the grid. But apparently its much more tricky than I was expecting!

2

The blackness looks like it’s coming from an external image (the file path in the image editor header). Perhaps the original model already had images mapped to it?
Try using the [X] to get rid of it, and hopefully you’ll see the grid again.

3

That would make sense, and it fits with me introducing a new object which wouldn’t have a texture path. Er, I can’t follow your instructions though, I cant find where its getting the image from in order to stop it from doing this. I’ll keep looking…

4

Well I found an extremely bad but working solution, I just exported my model as .nif and then reimported it, bam, everything works now. The mesh was slightly altered in the export but I’ve managed to UV map it all now, time to work on the textures :slight_smile: