trouble understanding texture editor
 

Morning all. Im having some roblems understanding how to work with u.v's in the texture editor. I understand how to get the u.v's of my object/s there in the first place, but the border edges of my uvs appear in orange and i lose them as soon as I go into component mode in the perspective view to highlight individual u.v's or edges. How do you make the u.v's appear white in the uv editor so that they remain permanent and editable?

you need to select the object in object mode for it to show up in the UVTE.
once you map the object it will appear orange, those are not the border edges. you can select edges in the perp view and cut them in the editor. you can select the uv's in the editor to unfold/relax them. how did you map the object?

I select it in object mode, go up to create uv's, clyndrical mapping, automatic mapping e.t.c. It shows up in the uv editor, but the minute I click around the workspace or try to select a component, uv/edge etc in either the persp view or the uv editor, the orange lines disappear. They are supposed to be white no? I did it using the cracker box tutorial from my maya's help files earlier and I got through it, but I'm not sure what I'm doing differently now

Make sure that after selecting the object in object mode, when you go to the texture editor, you select UVs selection (Right-click>UVs anywhere in there), and your tool is the select tool(you may want to reset it if it's possible).
if you still can't work with them post a pic.
Hope it helps,
Benny

o.k. I've slightly got the hang of it. I dont know what I did or why but the edges of the shells are now coming up white. And I understand that to keep multiple shells visible in the editor I need to have said multiple shells selected in the workspace. I can see that getting comfortable and confident mapping uv's is going to create alot of frustration!

Yup it is!Stick with it though, once you get used to it strangly, I find anyway, it becomes quite theraputic in a way!

It's a funny thing, one day you'll be ripping your hair out finding it a right pain and wondering why its so dificult, then you'll start to map a model and bang it all fits together!

ha....hmmmm...fingers crossed

Weird, I never needed to be in object mode first for the UVs to show. ben hobden, the problem you're having is confusing me, when you create projections, yeah there will be a change in color, just so you see whats being fuddled with in the UV editor but thats only temporary, deselect it and they're back to white as they should be (or whatever color you have setup in your prefs) when you do projections, just move them out of the way til you're ready to start fitting stuff together, if don't you can just use the Move UV shell tool at some point. Shells will show up in the UV editor as long as you have the objects selected in the workspace. I find the shade UVs (Image>Shade UVs) handy. As far as shell edges showing up white, maybe you have show texture borders enabled, I can't think of anything else.

It wouldnt surprise me if I was confusing you as I'm confused myself. I've spent several more hours with it and its slowly coming together. I did play with showing border edges to see if that was the problem/cure, so maybe that confused what I was saying. I have been using shaded shells since and I find this helps too. I think I was confused because when I was deselecting objects/geometry, it was disappearing from the uv editor, and to my uneducated mind that meant that any work I had done to that shell had gone with it, whereas I've since realised reselecting that object brings back the shell in its last place, and I've got used to the whole method of selecting, reselecting, and working in both the workspace and the uv editor at the same time. I took several useful tips from the free texturing tutorial yesterday for use in photoshop, and i have just completed my first texture I was happy with, that there wasnt such an amount of trial and error about. Hope to post pics over next few days.
Thankyou to everybody for your help.