After searching the Internet for countless hours, and trying and (usually) failing over and over, I've finally decided to ask somewhere for help.

I could make this post really long(er), but I'll cut out the unnecessary information just to get to the point that I need help with.

I'll start off with what I'm trying to do. As the topic states, I am trying to make decent looking Isometric Sprites for use in a mod for Starcraft. Now, Starcraft is in old game, so it's stuck with a 256 color palette that totally kills any detail on models, which makes things extremely difficult for getting the models to look good ingame. For reference, here's the look I'm trying to replicate: [Link to www.thezeal.com]

Seems like it would be simple to recreate, but oh God, no.

So after about 100 times (no exaggeration) of trial and error, I've come to realize the problem lies around UVW maps. Now, I've used UVW maps with self painted textures in the past on the models, but they looked like crap ingame. But, when I opened up a model with 3ds Max from a game called Battlezone and applied a texture to it, it looked pretty good, and there was a lot of visible difference in different areas of the model, instead of just a big glob of gray like I had before. Same thing with Homeworld 2 models.

I went to view the UVW maps for it, and here's what they look like: [Link to i536.photobucket.com]

As you can see, it's quite a mess. But it somehow makes the texture that is wrapped around it looks perfect. By the way, I'm using the 3Ds' material editor for apply textures, not actually painting them out, though I did do that at one point during this.

Basically, the main question is: How do I get my sprites to match those in Starcraft, but more importantly, how the heck do I make those mysterious messy UVW maps that work like a charm? I'm nowhere near an expert with 3Ds max, as I only use it for rendering, not UVW mapping. I usually just use the auto mapping feature in Wings 3d for that.

Here are some examples with just a random texture I threw on it:

Without the messy UVW's:
[Link to i536.photobucket.com]

With the messy UVW's:
[Link to i536.photobucket.com]

Thanks in advance for any help I get!

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