Need UV/texture help...

I made a quick mock-up of a FSW plane in blender, but I have very poor artists skills. I'd like to unwrap it in UUW and texture it, but I'm looking for some advice on how best to unwrap and texture it.

Do you try to keep the image proportional and the exact same shape? Where would you seam the model (through the vertical or horizontal axis... or elsewhere)?

Any other general advice would be appreciated, as I'm a noob at the artwork stuff...

I would seam it at the wings, or at a part that is the most un-noticable.

I would avoid trying to do it all automactically. Try and select the parts individually, such as the windscreen, and unwrap them seperately. It gives you more control over which parts get more texture space.

im just learning this myself
if the model is the same both side then cut it in half and uv one half to save on uv space then mirror the half over

pick the bits that you want good detail on and scale them up in your uv

make sure you over paint the uv by about 10 pixels if you mirror anything as this gets rid of the seem in blitz, that took half a day yesterday to figure out :(

Stupid filtering :o(

Good point about the mirroring though.

If your willing to spend the cast, $200 headus UV Layout is hands down the fastest UV unwrapper I've ever used. I can UV a complex model in minutes! It's worth checking out.

have you tryed out to uv map in blender itself.

http://download.blender.org/documentation/oldsite/oldsite.blender3d.org/20_Blender%20tutorial%20UV%20Mapping.html

Yes blender has quite a good unwrapper.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu2jZwRmz1o