Materials to faces and UV mapping?

[micheus]

Hi digitaldavinci. I hope I can help you with this.
It's something hard to explain writing and there are some small variations we can have in the process depending on what exactly we intend to do.

I recommend you to watch these very instructive tutorials. The guy will talk about another situation which is when we have separated objects, uvmap them and then combine them:
UVMapping in Wings3D - part 1
UVMapping in Wings3D - part 2

Well, lets go...

I was assuming I could select faces, apply a material, uvMap and create text (...)

I found this problem as I was working the wings interface and started noticing work was disappearing. (...)

You can, but you will have problems by loosing the applied material and maybe spend sometime reassign it.

Why that happens?
- Wings3D is going to use one material for each UVmapped object. So, if you select a set of faces from a object and unwrap it - at the first time - a new material named <object_name>_auv will be created and the previous material you had assigned to that set will become unused.
Then, when you select the next set of faces from the same object and unwrap it no new material will be created. You must to notice the AutoUV window will be shown only the new UV mesh and the background image is the one created in the previous step.

Assuming in the first time you enabled the Background->Color and Draw Edges option in Create Texture to get the mesh (UV island) drawn on the texture image in order to paint it further in another app, then if you keep the same settings for Create Texture, this time it will overwriting the texture image you just create in the first step.

To avoid that, you can choose use the texture image for the Background option. This way the UV mesh will be drawn cumulatively.
Again, I was assuming you want to use only one image to keep the texture for the entire object.

The previous used material becomes unused. And so on...
But, you can to reassign the faces to the previous material just after you unwrap the mesh and when you assign the texture image to the material everything should to be ok.

In this scenario, maybe the best practice would be to create Selection Groups for every set of faces you want so assign a material and unwrap the entire object first.
- Select the set of faces and create a Selection Group;
- UVmap the faces - set the cuts in AutoUV Segmenting and unwrap them;
- In AutoUV Editor window you still don't need to use Create Texture - you can ignore the window by now;

Repeat the process until you finish to process all the object's faces and when you reach the last set of faces, then in AutoUV Editor window:
- You can ensure the proportions are OK. I body selection mode select all the islands and use Scale->Normalize Sizes;
- Arrange the islands the way you want. You can use the Selection Groups window to select the islands (that will have the same material) if you need to arrange them close to each other;
- When you finish the islands arrangement, now you can create the texture image that will be used as reference for you to paint it.

You can now use the Selection Group window to recall the faces you want to define a new material. When you have painted the texture you just need to assign it to that material.


I suggest you to try this process using a simple cube to see how it can work.

p.s. JFYI, if you need to save a project which has materials that are not assigned to any object you must to use the option File->Save Unused Materials.