Textures & UV Editing

I watched a tutorial today on textures and uv editing. It finally made all of my problems with textures make sense. Basically I was trying to manipulate textures in a manner in which they could not be manipulated.

I put it to work right away on my Landing Site scene. I got the textures for the container and the blockhouse to work after a few attempts. They looks fine. Working with uv editing is reasonably easy as long as the objects are simple symmetrical cubes.

Landing Site scene with new textures on the container and the Building

Two problems. Number one the uv editing panel makes textures equal in aspect ratio even when they are not. So textures tend to get stretched. I am not sure if you can stretch the uv editing map so that the proper aspect ratio can be worked upon in an image editor. Number two my already created objects were made up of multiple objects, subtractions, joins, merges. Creating seams for them is next to impossible. After a few tries I have decided I am better off starting from scratch.

Attempting to create a UV Map of an existing complex object

In the future I need to create simple hull shapes and then join things like engines and turrets on to the hull after the textures are set.

I did create a quick new simple hull shape, see below, the textures worked but I do have the stretching problem.

A simple hull shape and an interchangeable pod held aft