UVW map start

Are you following some kind of tutorial?

I am for the greatest part. Though it's rather out dated and the pieces I have are interesting to try to line up. The principals remain the same but the layout's changed in the program since the tutorial was made.

Can we see the sword model?, Should be able to simplify the UV map quite a lot.

Yeah, it's actually in my project's page. But also here's the render from my page: Sword

I'm going to try to break the UVW down by element and see if I can work that way. Maybe longer but if it's easier I'm all for it.

While UV mapping, keep your texture in mind, as in, which pieces will have different textures. Then lay out entire sections together. There's no need to do it one face at a time.

What a mess there ;D

I presume you use 3ds max, so do yourself a favor and make couple of things:

don't make maps for the whole sword at once - first select part of your sword (eg. all polygons of the blade) and use flatten mapping, but remember to increase Face Angle Threshold to something higher than default (eg. 90, or even 180) this way all those separate polygons will be merged nicely into copule of pieces instead of a thousand ;]

That's what I was wondering, so basically I just do literally one element at a time? Like select each element in the map once I do the open editor and go on from there piece by piece? i'll try that.

Glad I wasn't the only one that thought this was a little too complicated.