thanks!

ok, so I got my item set as a gold star, properly rigged, and texture is fine and all that jazz in the item preview.

except in the test map, the texture is completely black in-game but not in the preview.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=183450703

you can even see in the class icon that the item has the proper texture.

the root of this problem I think is because I used a duplicate of the heavy smd that I imported, removed unnessecary geometry and rerigged.

I ended up fiddling with vertex paint, and removing all the materials, the result is the same

the only explanation I can think of is either some kind of .QC error when importing, or something issue in blender. I am stumped and frustrated, because if I don't get this fixed, any full item set shots are unacceptable because of this error.

EDIT: I redid some tests, and it turns out that when the player dies, the texture becomes fine, but otherwise the error is still intact when they are alive.... what.

yes, that was it! thanks!

ok, I have my model complete and textured, when I try to bind parts of the mesh to certain bones, the position is all messed up when I export and preview.

it's managable with hats, but now that I've gotten into miscs, it goes -completely- insane.

is there a way to make mesh positioning easier? or am I just gonna be ending up manhandling the mesh through the bind pose preview?

I can't remember how, but in a previous version of blender, I was able to create an unwrapped UV map that was made for use in external image programs like GIMP or photoshop.

that was two years ago.

Now in v2.68a I cannot seem to find or remember how to do this, is there some way to generate a UV map as a reference for editing that doesn't involve zooming out and screenshotting the image itself? (mostly because the source image i'm using is bigger than my monitor's resolution.)

thanks man