Just curious, how do you guys create meshes for 3d shapes that are more complicated than a plane or a cube? I was working with texporter, trying to create the nice plane image on a mesh that has been layed out farely flat, and then turning off the "Edit mesh" modifier to make it return to its proper shape, but i am left with textures that, while lined up fine while edit mesh is on, get thrown completely off when i turn off the modifier. I am thinking its because I had to detatch/reattach a few faces while getting the image to lay out flat, but i can think of no other way to get the shape in a position to offer a decent texport. Any thoughts? And for those playing along at home, I was trying to work with Paul Steed''s 3d modeling book, but got a little confused when he mentions to never use detach or else risk the problem i have above, but then proceeds to use what i believe is detech to lay the model out.

I think you are going about this all wrong. There is no need to lay your actual mesh out.
Once you have your mesh, select some faces on a side that is mostly planar (the front, side, or back of a head for example). Apply a UVW map modifier then add an Unwrap UVW. In the rollout, hit Edit, and you will see the UVWs for those faces, edit them so they are nice and neat. Do this for the whole mesh. Once you are done, collapse the modifier stack and you can see all the UVWs at once to weld them together.
Use textporter to export an image of your UVWs for you to draw over.

-Lou

You''re likely reattaching the faces in the wrong order. If you need to detach faces detach them one at a time and remember the order. You need to reattach them in the proper order. It requires that you be very careful. That''s why Steed recommends against it.

On a related note. I don''t know if any of you have seen the features in 3ds max 5 yet, but you''ll love this. Texture flattening is totally automated. No more morphs, detaching polygons, or manually applying many edit mesh modifiers to apply texture coordinates. It looks very cool.


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http://www.3dcgi.com/

another method that i have read about is that you can make a copy of the mesh, make it a morph target, flatten that, and you can restore it by moving it to the next morph state.

a2k

why are you detaching faces in the first place?? there is no need to for texture placement.