F C Textures

Daniel Walker's Texturing Guide

(AKA: "There's more than one way to skin a Jabberwocky")

I'll skip over these early points, since they will probably be familiar to most people.

First, we load our ship:

This is the vessel known as the Jabberwocky, which I'll be reskinning to make more effective use of the texture-space by mirror planing the texture.

I'm going to skin the ship up as a new variant Jabberwocky, called the "Sparth", which will serve as a general interceptor/escort for those ships of that class I tend to refer to as "Beyonder" ships (The Morrigan, Rosault, Doiltach, Nemglan Class Carrier, Sceolan, et cetera).

I delete half it's vertices:

And insert a mirror plane via Tools>Virtual Mirror>Create:

That will give you your old ship back, except that when you come to apply a UV map to it, you only actively need to assign textures to half you planes: the planes on the other half of your ship are automatically selected for you. How you do this is your choice, but I'd advise you to avoid unecessary work in marrying adjacent textures. As you'll see, a lot of my designs are dictated by my efforts to avoid all of that.

After I unfold, I shove my textures around and resize them a much as possible, to fill every available vacancy on the texture. You can grap vertices and move them, and flatten them (this is especially useful at the ends of tubes, which tend to unfold in curves, otherwise.

Now export it and open your graphics package - I'm using the GIMP.