Textures behaving strangely in Unity

[mossman]

Applying textures to my model in the Unity editor seems to only be affecting the model's color; It's like the editor takes the average color value across the entire texture and uses that instead of the actual image. I just get a featureless gray matte on my part when I want a nice metal texture. I've been able to export the model for use in KSP, and the model seems to work fine except that the texture on the part in-game is that same smooth, featureless default generic-looking texture.

Just a note, I've really only just started model and texture editing and am quite bad at it still. Using blender for modeling.

So what am I doing wrong here? Thanks for reading. If clarification is needed I'll be glad to give it.

[Nazari1382]

Did you... uv map it in blender? What are you creating textures with and what format are you saving them as?

[mossman]

I just made a noise field in Paint.net and used it as a .PNG.

My understanding of UV mapping is that it's just a way to visualize how a complex texture will lie on the model. I'm trying to give it a very simple texture that isn't differentiated at all across different parts of the model, so according to my tenuous grasp of the subject generating a UV projection shouldn't be necessary. Does that make sense, and is my understanding here flawed?

[hoojiwana]

Even if your part is going to be one block of colour, you still need to provide a UV map so the model knows where to apply the texture. Otherwise you get the blank grey/white that you're experiencing. The UV map doesn't need to be anything in particular for just a block of colour, just use any old projection method and then your texture should work.

I do recommend setting out a proper UV map and texture for your part though, it can make a world of difference to how good something looks.

[mossman]

Alright. Thanks for the tip.

[EndlessWaves]

Well, unity will apply the texture even if you don't explicitly specify a UVMap, but it may be applying it at an unexpected scale, so you're seeing a single pixel or a massively tiled tiny version that averages out at your viewing distance