Thanks Michael and Jamie for your kind response.

I often do my renders too dark, I don't know why really. Perhaps I should calibrate the monitor on my laptop?

Regarding the texturing, I ended up doing the mapping with UVMapper Pro. I have trueSpace from many years ago which has roughly the same capabilities but is completely incapable of importing/exporting Moi's models with the vertex normals intact. trueSpace is no orphan there either. There are a *lot* of 3D apps which get it wrong. UVMP fortunately imports and exports the vertex normals OK, so I was able to map the model and export a template texture map from there for the major components. I mostly just used planar mapping for the parts, occasionally cubic.

I used the following method which worked for me:

1. Exported components from Moi with coloured surfaces to break the model into particular areas I wanted to map. Attachment 1 shows the hull done this way. The most important coloured areas are the red & blue surfaces as these are partially obscured by other parts of the hull and require separate mapping. Most of the rest of the hull I wanted to map as one part. I still coloured the areas though (eg. the dazzle pattern) as UVMP can create the texture template with colours to differentiate those areas of the map, very handy later.

2. Imported the model into UVMP. The template as can be seen in attachment 2 is all lumped into one spot at this stage as there is no mapping.

3. Select areas by material (or group when appropriate) as shown in attachment 3. The selected parts can be seen in attachment 4.

4. Move selected part of template to a fresh spot (attachment 5).

5. Apply mapping to the selection (attachment 6).

6. Repeat for all the other sections which require mapping until you get something like attachment 7. Note that the separately coloured surfaces on the hull sides were mapped together but you can still see them on the template as distinct coloured areas.

It would be normal at this stage to use the template as a guide (loaded into a layer) in a paint package to create the actual texture map. I decided instead to flood fill the coloured areas of the template (using a homemade flood fill utility) and then make minor adjustments to that in a paint package which allowed me to get very precise placement of items like the dazzle pattern.

The final map (size reduced) can be seen in attachment 8.

None of the above will be new to anyone on this forum but I floundered with this for so long, perhaps it will be useful to someone having the same trouble.