The vertices in the UV Window can be pushed, pulled, scaled, or moved just like when in Edit Mode. Move them around and scale them to fill the window a little better. Then Pin them all with(PKEY). Pinning comes in handy with more complex models. When unwrapping a fancy model, you could pin a few vertices and unwrap again. It forces the LSCM to base it's calculations around the pinned verts. You would repeat the pinning several times to get it right, but you have to recalculate the LSCM every time to do any good. Our model wasn't too bad so we pinned it at the end. You can also unpin them by using (ALT+PKEY) if you need to.

To make a texture map we need to export our layout. Right under the UV window is a UV menu button. Click it and then select the option Save UV Face Layout...

That in turn brings up some more buttons in the bottom window. Things to change here are the Size field, which is how many pixels square you want the texture to be and the export path you want the map to be in. You could also change the wire size if you want.

Open up the exported map in your drawing program of choice. I used another free program, the Gimp. Paint over your map and save it. I'm not going to show how to do that, there are tons of tuts out there on how to use the different drawing programs and I don't know which one you would use anyway. If you don't like working with .tga files or your program of choice doesn't support them, just grab the Gimp save it under a different format. Blender can open the map up in other formats, such as .bmp or .jpeg.

Go back to Blender. Under the UV window, open the Image menu which should have only one option, Open. Find the texture map you painted and open it.

It should line up perfect. Make sure you're not in Edit Mode. To see it on the sword, you can change the Viewpoint Shading to Textured by using (ALT+Z).

Now the easy part. To export it to DirectX, go up to File, Export, DirectX and choose a location and name. Easy, huh?

I know it's bad to assume, but assuming you have the DirectX 9 SDK installed, open up the Mesh View under DirectX Utilities and open up the exported file. Make sure the texture and model are in the same folder. Ahhh...it works! This needs to be in a game somewhere.

That ends our journey to make and texture a game model with Blender. If your sword didn't come out quite the way you wanted, you can grab my .blend file and the texture I made here. Feel free to send me any feedback, questions you may have, or even to show me a final textured picture of your game models here. That would be cool.

--Yoda