Texturing!

We all chipped in to texture the museum scene, as there was plenty to do. The first thing I did was the light switch, which was modelled by Maik. It's hardly the most important object in the scene, but everything has to be textured sooner or later, and I am a complete beginner to texturing. Since the object has no curves whatsoever I went about it by automatic mapping. When it was unfolded, there were a few UVs dotted around that need to be sowed together, particularly the sides of the squares. I selected vertex and clicked on  a vertex on the edge of the square so that it would highlight all the vertices it was attached to so that I knew which UVs i need to sow. The final result is shown below:

I'm not going to pretend that I already new how to do this, as I couldn't pick much up from the elctures as I kept getting so lost. So Maik and Dave ran me through the basic techniques of unwrapping which allowed me to get involved with texturing more comfortably. So credit where credit is definitely due, thank you Maik and Dave!

I looked on the internet for a plastic texture for the light. Although they are always flat white in real life, there didn't seem to be a point texturing it if I was just going to paint over the UVs white in photoshop. I found the texture below from deviantart.com. It gave it a bit more of a realistic feel than would a flat white lambert of blinn.

So now that the UVs were unfolded and the texture was decided all I needed to do next was apply it. I created a PSD network and saved it to the sourceimages file. The I opened it in photoshop and dragged the texture over onto layer 1 of the UV snapshot. Resized it, saved it, then applied it as a lambert and the lightswitch was textured!

And here's the final result from mentalray: