You guys are over thinking it, just select the edges, right click and choose weld bounday points/edges.

Ah, I just didn't know what the tool was called. Sweet deal!

That reminds me
Blender protip:
If you can't remember the location or the exact name of a tool, hit spacebar and try out some words. When it pops up in the search menu the tools shortcut, if it has one, will be on the right side.

Agreed. That has to be one of the best features of blender. You don't need to know where anything is - just press space and they're all there at the press of a button...if you know what they're called, of course.

EDIT: Just made another crate...Which texture do you guys like better?

The first texture is better IMO.

I like the second one better. The light spots dont look very good IMO. You could desaturate the second one a bit to get a compromise.

I concur with ANDE, the second one is better. It could use desaturating as it was anyway, it looks way too new, clean and pristine.

Nice crate model too.

I think which one is better depends entirely on the setting it's used in.
And both look good.

Thanks for the feedback guys! I was thinking along the lines of kinetos, with a more weathered outdoor one and a cleaner indoors one, but I could probably just desaturate the second one a bit, as Ande said. It would probably make more sense to just have both indoor and outdoor use the same texture, albeit with a slightly different saturation...

EDIT:Revised the texture to make it a bit more faded. What do you guys think?
New: Original:

The new texture is perfect to me.

Glad you like it.

Hopefully you guys will get where my models are from after this one:
Also, I just found this awesome normal map generator:
http://ssbump-generator.yolasite.com/

Takes a little bit of tweaking to make them look good, but can achieve some quite nice looking normal maps with a reasonable amount of features.

I'm also curious; is there any way in blender to apply a seamless texture to a model, and then unwrap the model with the applied texture in sections? So each face then has its own version of the texture? That would be kinda handy...


EDIT:
A windmill: There are a fair few unnecessary edges on this thing, especially around the top, but I don't really care that much...it's still under 1000 vertices....

Skyrim, is it?

Yeah.

Sweet stuff lucasfart.

Thanks.

Now i just have to texture them all. Texturing takes so much longer then actually making the models.

You could mostly find free textures online to use as a base, like wood grain, stone and rusted metal then just add an AO pass plus some of your own small details.

Well I've given it a pretty basic texture - it still took pretty long, what with all the faces to UV.
With applying an AO pass, that's applied to the texture right? Because I don't usually make my models use one unwrapped UV layout. There's usually one texture for wood, which I just keep tiling over and over, one for stone, one for the window and one for the basic white building, leaving me with a massive mash of UV overlaps...

So this is what the UV's look like for the windmill:

You cannot make a proper AO image with any overlapping UV's parts that shouldn't be shadowed will have shadows from other parts. You should try to make everything one texture sheet, there's no reason why you cannot make 1 1024*1024 image for the entire model and make it look good in game. This way you can also keep any contrast in detail to a minimum, like say a small part of the model using it's own texture that's the same resolution of a much larger part, it will be noticeable that the texture for the smaller mesh will be much sharper than the one that is more visible.

Have no idea how to generate an AO map in blender but XSI you just use ultimapper with an input mesh that can either just be a clone of the original or something higher resolution for a better result.

You also shouldn't view your textured models in 3d software using scene lighting, it greatly changes how the texture looks and when you put it in game it may not look the way it does in blender. I'd change the view to something like XSI's textured decal view, no lighting or specular shine.

I'll give the normal method of UV'ing a try. Hopefully I get it figured out ok...

Also, what do Ambient Occlusion passes do? Bake shadows onto the texture? And if so, wouldn't it really depend on where you have your light coming from?

Here's the non-lit version of my model: With blender you just select "shadeless" on your material tab...pretty handy.

It will make a separate black and white texture that you can make into a layer in photoshop over your texture, usually needs opacity tweaking to get a good final result. In XSI you can use the scene lighting or set up your own and yes, it pretty much makes a map of shadows much like your other pictures where the model was white with black shading.