I've done about 4 different tutorials and I'm having difficulty figuring out this UVW mapping stuff for my model. I've applied different ways of doing it but it never seems to accurately represent the shapes of the faces in the UVW editor. If I were to skin a ship like the imperial shuttle for example, what method would work the best? I'm using gmax.

Whichever method I try the faces appear compressed --> <-- in the UVW editor. I've tried the planar method where you flatten the model, the box method, the material ID method and I pretty much get the same result. What am I doing wrong?

Apply a checker pattern for the material and use planar maps (well most of the time).

Use the unwrap modifier and try to get rid of distortion in the pattern.

I'm thinking this wont help you much if you just started to learn UVW mapping.

Read this (http://www.3dtotal.com/ffa/tutorials/max/joanofarc/bases1.asp) and you should have all the info you need, that's how i learned.

Good luck.

With 3ds max 5 and 6 you got it pretty easy compared to gmax. The UVW editor is far superior. I followed this tutorial
http://waylon-art.com/uvw_tutorial/uvwtut_01.html)
and with a couple of clicks I had the first portion of the model mapped out. I got 20 days left on my 3ds max trial, so I should still try to learn how to do it on gmax.