Texturing in Maya is made a lot easier than in other programs because of the clever design of the tools available to you. However, there is a learning curve. Once you're used to the UV Texture Editor and friends you'll never want to go back to 3D Studio MAX's UVW (un)wrap modifiers. Before you're used to them, you'll tear out a fair amount of hair!
To get you into the swing of things I'll lead you through texturing the mighty Don_T_Shoot's Martian Raygun, as seen in the Mars Attacks! mod for SWAT3.
Special thanks to the Don for allowing his gun to be used in this tutorial. You can download it here: raygun-maya.zip. If you have Maya PLE and not the full version, you'll have to knock up your own gun similar to Don's but you can still use the texture files from the Zip. Come back when you're ready...
With the raygun loaded into Maya, let's begin.
| intro | part 1: Assigning materials | part 2: Applying mappings | part 3: Mapping the rest of the gun | part 4: Fitting the skin |