Blender issues

Applying UV's is surprisingly well solved, working with them is another thing. You can have different selections in the 3D view aswell as in the UV-editor. Sounds great at first, but it brings along problems. The UV-editor for example is only showing faces i selected in the 3D-view, unselected ones are invisible. I see the principle behind it, but i'm not all too sure about how practical that is. It leads to other problems, like the next one.

• I didn't find a quick way to determine how the selection from the UV-editor correlates to the ones in the 3D-view. I have one face selected in the UV editor, which one is it on the model? This is especially annoying when you haven't finished the UV-seams-setup for the unwrap. Beside several well unwrapped bodyparts I ended up with one big blob of uvs that i didn't know what it belonged to. So selecting that piece alone didn't give me a hint. The only option was to select various parts of the model in the 3D view and check back wether it would include the blob-UVs. I hope it's just me who does something wrong...

Edit: I have the solution. It's of course trivial, i just didn't find the correct button. It's surprisingly called "Keep UV and edit mode mesh selection in sync"!

• The only format that i found to export the UVs for texturing was to EPS or SVG. I didn't find any bitmap-format and if i want to use phtoshop for texturing, i guess i have to go through another program to convert that, as my PS version isn't up for SVG. Maybe i find me a plugin somehwere...

• The texture placement of the 3D view doesn't really represent the actual texture placement you'll get when rendering. For my little skin-man i used several options of the file-texture. For the skin i changed the size of the mapping, as i have a small skin texture applied to a human-sized figure. The 3D view is not updating any of that. For the eyes i used a simple texture of a pupil. I turned off the texture repeating and again the 3D view didn't acknowledge for that. Bugger!

• The blend modes in the textures seem to work differently than layer blend modes in Photoshop. I tried "overlay", in which a perfect 50% gray isn't making any difference to a picture in Photoshop. In Blender it seems to darken the material. If it is only layed over the diffuse texture, then it's calculated differently than in Photoshop. This way i am not really trustful in the other blend modes. I'm not saying that Blender is doing them wrong, i am just used to the Photoshop ones.