Mike or anyone who can help - uv mapping?
 

Ok, near the start of your tutorial you have your unmapped character selected and when you open the uv texture editor window the character is displayed in there as a white mesh.

The thing is when i have my character selected and i open the uv texture editor
all thats displayed in there is the top right square is filled ( im going to include a pic ).
What am i doing wrong here?
Also is there a simple way to reduce the polygon count and then increase it at the end of all the modeling / texturing because like i said before my comp starts to slow up when i try and extract body parts ( as shown in your tutorial ).
My poly count is 11384

Thanks again Mike

Sometimes you have a scrambled mesh, sometimes you have nothing. Either way, you'll need to UV map it. Nothing wrong.

If you still have history from your smooth, you can set the smooth's divisions back to 0, which will take your model to its original state. If not, there isn't an easy way to reduce it.

The orange part is your texture I think, or if the mesh is really dense it could be the faces selected. Can you give us a bigger pic of the UV texture editor?

I believe it's just displaying the orange color that he has on the model at the moment.

If i were to post a closer pic all you would see is a flat orange, i've zoomed right in but no mesh.
I've managed to seperate the model parts quickly now i just went :- Edit polygons > Extract > then I unchecked the seperate extracted faces box, not sure if thats the right way to go about it but it did seperate ok.
Sorry Mike i may be being real dumb here but I thought your tutorial was about showing how to uv map my model for texturing?

Yep

Is that yep im dumb or yep its a uv tutorial, heh
Sorry ive only been using Maya for two weeks with no manual :: collage disks :: so things you probably find real easy are very new to me. Anyway, ive used a cylindrecial uv map on the whole object, then the object appears in the editor window.
So now i'm gonna start your tutorial again and start breaking my object into parts... watch this space ;-)