G+: As a beginning Blender user, I've struggled with the concepts but managed to produce some low-poly mesh bunting for #MardiGras in #SecondLife. The hardest thing right now is keeping materials and textures in the right order and remembering to assign green apples to green apples, and oranges to oranges. Currently alphabetical order matters with materials so it might be smart to rename any assigned textures in Blender in the same alphabetical order. Unfortunately, I am not that organized so it was a carnival of blunders until I got it sorted.
These "bunting banners" could be even lower poly so they could be longer, but I thought of a way to do that after this had been uploaded to the "big grid." Still, they look pretty festive.
The testing in the Beta Grid led me to upload just 2 versions, a "medium" LOD that actually looked good at a reasonable distance, and a "low" LOD that was visible at maximum camera range but is just a flat one-sided plane with the same materials/texture faces. They could be better, but they're a start.
The "high" LOD version has some issues and would have been too high-poly for what I needed, which was to decorate my shopfront for the upcoming #MardiGras celebration in St John (on the "big grid").
All in all, a student effort with a "B" grade, but I'm pretty happy with the result.
That's very nice. You went to more effort than most people put into it. I have found that that this gets rapidly easier and you will be able apply these techniques to much larger projects, and do them very quickly very soon.
You can change the names of textures and Materials at any time There's no particular order to them. I don't usually rename the textures inside Blender, but I should,as I can get lost in them. I do make sure my material names are well defined as I use the same ones over and over until its's texture is filled.