[Guide] Understanding how to properly texture

By this i mean identifying which item you want to re-texture, and setting up all the programs accordingly. For this tutorial i am going to be using the 120 small male Trojan armor, (003132000.c3 and 003132300.dds)

The first thing we want to do is convert the .c3 into a .3DS using Biturn:

We then open the .dds in Photoshop, re-size it to 512x512 or 1024x1024 for higher resolution and save it as a .JPEG so we can apply it to our model in 3DS:

Now we have everything prepared it's time to load the model into 3DS:

Once the model is successfully in 3DS we delete the box and two weapons leaving only the v_body. Click on the model and press M to open up the material editor window. Click the button next to diffuse, and then the Bitmap button, select your texture and open it. Then Assign Material to selection, and Show shaded Material in viewport :

The UVW Map is a great way to know exactly what is what inside the texture, and it also gives you great guidelines to work with. Ill be explaining in this section how to export the models UVW Map and put it into Photoshop to work with.

So first we select our model in 3DS, go to the Modify tab and select "Unwrap UVW", once we have it we click on the "Open UV Editor" button under the "-Edit UVs" tab. This will bring up the UVW Map window, go to Tools>Render UVW Template. Enter the width and height you used previously while re-sizing your texture (either 512x512 or 1024x1024) and press the Render UV Template button. Then click on the Save icon and save it as a .PNG:

Once we have the UVW Map saved as a .PNG, we open it up in Photoshop, drag over our texture into the .PNG file, make sure the texture is placed correctly and keep the UVW Map's layer above the textures layer, it should look like this:

Now we successfully have the UVW Map in Photoshop, ready to re-texture the armor! The great thing about the UVW Map, and mainly why we put the texture into 3DS is that we can use 3DS to identify what parts of the texture go where on the model, for example:

In that example we re-opened the UV Editor window and using the Polygon (or Face) tool selected a random piece of armor. Normally we would not really know what it did without extensive trial and error, but by using 3DS we discovered that it was the tip and side of the shoe.

An important part of texturing is creating seamless textures, here is an example of what i mean:

You will notice in that image that all the faces of the front of the armor have twin faces on the back, it is very important to learn which faces accompany which to be able to create a texture with no glitches.

It is also important (most of the time) to stay within direction of the inner white lines of the UVW Template when doing pieces of armor etc, as they may become blurry if you do not. Example of a well placed chest piece + shoulder buckle: