Apply planar mappings in the Y-axis to the top
and bottom of the gun.
If you have the viewport set to textured view (hotkey: 6), you will see the texture applied to the faces and not looking too clever. We'll fix that later. Firstly we must apply mappings to all the faces of the mesh.
Don't forget you can use the Apply button of the Planar Mapping option box to preview the projection. Change the axis until it sits nicely over the top of the selected faces and the shape in the UV Texture Editor resembles that of mesh. Then click Project to finalise the mapping.
Also apply Z-axis mappings to the front and rear sections of the gun.
All of these things are exactly the same on opposite sides so we can place the UVs over the top of each other as before.
Next select the sides of the barrel (not the ends):
Making this selection is tricky as there are a lot of faces around. Either enter wireframe mode (hotkey: 4) and marquee select around the area shown in the image above, then unselect any unwanted faces from a side view, or select the edges of the barrel and then convert the selection to faces from the Edit Polygons / Selection menu. Apply an X-axis map to this section then a Z-axis map to the each "end" of the barrel.
By now it should be clear that the process of applying mappings to faces of the model is a simple matter of monkey work. You will be fine as long as you make sensible decisions about how to map certain groups of faces. For example, apply mappings to each side of the pistol grip:
And others to the front and rear:
Doing this gives you recognisable shapes to play with in the UV Texture Editor. This makes skinning much easier.
When you've finished your texture editor will look something like this:
As you can see, each set of UVs matches the part of the gun it's assigned to quite well. The next step is to arrange them to fit your skin.
| intro | part 1: Assigning materials | part 2: Applying mappings | part 3: Mapping the rest of the gun | part 4: Fitting the skin |