Thanks Dave,

I am back trying to figure out how to texture my sand speeder. Texturing really has me befuddled. My model is more complex then the one in Jay's tutorial and I really want to add panel line and rivet details using bump, color, and spec maps but I am having a terrible time trying to figure out how to do it.

It's really a problem with both the actual texturing and UV Layout. In the WIP posts I have screen shots of my UV layouts and you can see from the UV test maps the UV's a clean and even. But the maps are not layed out nice and square like I see a lot of other peoples UV maps. Which makes texture painting easier. When I try to scoot UV's around to lay them out in nice horizontal and vertical rows and columns (which is an incredible pain in the ass btw) the map goes all wonky and quite frankly I cannot see how it would be possible prevent this based on the shape of the objects. So there has to be something I am missing. I could break the parts into tons of smaller sections that would lay out in nice square patches of UV's but then I have a bazillion seams.

There are seriously no good tutorials on the way to layout and texture a highly detailed model anywhere. I see tons of finished works that do exactly what I want to do but not one person really seems to want to reveal the secrets of how to do it.

Everything I have found on texturing is for zbrushing organic models. There are tons of these tuts in nauseating detail. But everything I can find on hard surface detailing is so remedial as to be completely useless!

It's very frustrating seeing finished stuff with with the kind of detail I want, all done with color and bump and spec maps but nothing describing how to do it!!!