Game Asset Pillar: UV Unwrap Part II

Okee-doke!  We're still working on unwrapping UVWs, manipulating them in an image editing software (read: Photoshop), bringing the newly edited piece back into 3DStudio Max, and applying this beautiful new texture to our object.  This week, the professor gave us a simpler object than a human figure with folds and bends in his clothing.  To get us started he gave us the type of object we might see as a game asset.  He called it an Avatar Pillar.  It's dirt-simple, yet kind of awesome-looking at the same time.

Pretty cool, right?

This kind of pillar is the sort of thing players might use during a game to gain power-ups or something like that.  Since they're going to be right up on it, we should make it look extra nice.  We got some more instruction on how to put textures on an object, go into the "Edit UVWs" window to flatten the verts and edges into a wireframe, and then use "Render To Texture" to get our flat piece of artwork.  Using the default materials (rusted metal on the ankh and stone on the base) I got a basic flat texture to export into Photoshop.

 

The program tries to be helpful by adding in shadows to your new diffuse map.  Looks awful.  No problem, though, that's what we've got Photoshop for.  Since I've got Photoshop (PS) on my Mac and 3DS Max is on my fiancee's Windows box, I have to send the file over to the Mac.  After using the Alpha channel to remove all the colored portions of the image I was ready to begin finding, massaging, and placing my chosen textures on the diffuse map.  The prof said he'd like us to have 4 distinct renders of this Avatar Pillar, representing earth, air, fire, and water.  Cool!  A few hours PS work and I had my four diffuse maps.  The Earth map looked like this:

I can fix that seam on the base later and re-import it, I suppose

I used a regular white and gray marble for my base.  I was then able to use the adjustment tool in PS to change the color to suit each element: green for earth, yellow for air, red for fire, blue for water.  These are the same colors that many neoPagans use for candles in their ceremonies.  (You never know when random trivia will come in handy.)  For the earth, I even made a second map with the marble base texture removed and the stone of the ankh desaturated to black and white so I could use it as a bump map.  So far so good.  Then all I had to do was assign the diffuse map to each slot in my material editor (ankh and base), assign the bump map to a third material editor slot, apply them to the image and then I could...

What the...  That didn't look right at all!  The textures were much too small and left blank gray areas visible on the object!  Maybe if I tried it again I'd figure out what went wrong.

No, that didn't work.

Ah, come on!

YOU GOTTA BE $#!**!# ME!

Ten hours of work and this is what I end up with?!  Really?  This is the tough guy assignment all over again.  I did everything I was supposed to do.  I made sure the "render to texture" was 1024x1024.  I thought that was supposed to ensure that it fit exactly the same way the original "rendered to texture" diffuse map did before I dragged it into Photoshop.  What changed?  I don't know.

It's less than four hours until class, I'm tired, angry, and confused.  I'm sure there's some tiny obscure detail that I'm missing that's causing this mess, just like everything else in 3DS Max.  I've gotta get behind the wheel of a car in about three hours and I can't think clearly.  I think I'll just take a nap and bring everything with me to class so I can see what I did wrong.  Oh, and there's a midterm on this stuff in 3 and a half hours, too.  Yay!