How do I deal with moving objects on the tank (e.g. wheels, turret)?
That is, are they textured separately (I'm thinking of a separate image file for the unwrap)? or in the same image?
Tracks/ wheels usually go on a separate image from what I've seen for other FH2 vehicles. But that's normally because FH2 uses the same tracks texture for several different vehicles. e.g. pzIII M/N etc.. uses the same tracks texture, so no need to waste texture space on the body sheet if you already have the tracks texture from another vehicle.
Does it matter how the moving parts are placed in the file? (e.g. can the turret be next to the tank?)
If you're talking about the texture sheet and how parts should be UVed than no it doesn't matter. Just as long as you follow some basic UVing rules they can be placed anywhere on the texture sheet.
Also, what dimensions should I use? I'm currently testing with a 1024x1024 image. Should it be a higher res?
General rule of thumb is to use a square if you don't need a rectangle, that way the file size is smaller in the end. However, that being said, most FH2 vehicles are 2048X1024 so I'd go with that for the body of the vehicle.
I've managed to unwrap, paint, and apply the resulting texture/image to the vehicle, but it looks like I'm going to have to be careful about how things are unwrapped (e.g. stretching).
Yessss
UVing is probably one of the hardest and most tedious parts of modeling/ texturing.
Usually you wanna start by unwrapping everything at the same size (so don't scale anything just yet) (uncheck normalize map iirc) while you're doing this you can weld similar parts with the same smoothing groups or where it's logical to connect them with each other.
From there comes UV packing
(I hate this part) that's where you try to fit together an impossible puzzle of the parts you just unwrapped into whatever texture sheet you've set for yourself.
general rules of thumb with packing;
larger parts that are seen more by the player should get more texture space.
Pack everything as tightly as humanly possible to make the most of the texture sheet you're working with. But also be mindful of pixel bleeding
http://www.realitymod.com/forum/f189-modding-tutorials/90244-pixel-bleeding.htmlavoid distorting the proportions of your objects wherever possible. e.g. if you're gonna scale a part do it while holding shift to keep its same proportions so there's no pixel stretching.
TBH it might be helpful to post your UV sheet and model here as you go through the process. UVing is very important and we can help you make sure you don't have to do it again from scratch
