By *Nimphious
Step One
Unwrapping Your Object
First things first, we need an object to unrap. I've made a simple little object with extrusions on a box. Very uninteresting.
I've already slapped a simple material onto mine, incase you don't know how to do this yet, you might want to take an easier tutorial first. Just about everything can be learned using the tutorials that come with the program.
Now that we've got that out of the way, let's get down to business. UVW Mapping is rather simple, it's just very tedious, and time consuming. Let's get started by applying a UVW Unwrap modifier to our object.
Now our modifier has preserved out current mapping, but is allowing us to fine-tune it, or if need be, re-wrap completely. Let's take a look at the latter first.
Notice I've selected face editing mode under the UVW Modifier. This allows us to edit the faces in the mapping editor much like it would allow us to manipulate the faces in the viewport when selecting face editing mode on an editable mesh/poly. This allows us to use the UVW Unwrapper's automatic mapping functions.
Click on the edit button in the Parameters rollout to open up the UVW Editor window as shown.
This time, we'll use the Flatten Mapping method. Different methods are useful for different shapes. You can select the particular faces you want to unwrap if you like, or leave everything unselected to apply the unwrap to all faces.
Adjust the values until the result is nice and easy to work into what you want.
Now that we've got our faces mapped out nicely, we can move them around, resize them, and warp them into our desired positions. Wait, how do we know we're doing it right? We don't have a texture to work off! Just this stupid grid...
Well fear not, there's a solution.
In the drop down at the top-right of the window, you'll be able to select the texture you want to use for the background of the editor. This does not effect the texture on your model, but allows you to use the same texture map for different textures. If you have the texture in the scene, but it does not show up in this list, simply select "Reset Texture List" to refresh the list's cache.
And there you have it. Now we can place the polygons wherever we like. You can also chose either the vertex or the edge editing mode in the modifier's stack to adjust our mapping on a more precise level.
So here I've placed all my polygons where I want them, rather messy but it works, and remember that in some cases, imperfection is the key.
So there you have it. Don't forget to hit the makeitlookgood button =P