I would like to think that i can do all these things myself and that i am self taught, but its because of people like you that want to learn online that the teachers who taught me gave me the chance to pass on the knowledge so to speak, i do not know everything and am happy to be corrected when it means a better result.

For this tutorial i will assume that you already know your way around the max user interface,
and that you can use photoshop. Map models are becoming more and more complex in games as the graphics capability of PCs grows month by month, map models can add depth to a level and give a theme more authenticity, so making them look thier best is very important, and to do that we need to use uvw unwrapping , it essentailly takes each and every face of the model and lays them all out flat so you can apply textures without distortion, as you will see there are many right ways to use the uvw unwrap modifier so dont worry if someone has told you its done another way as they are probably right also.

PART 2 OF ABOVE

We are going to apply a texture to a model in max, it may seem a little complex at first but persivere it will all work out right in the end, as long as you follow certain key rules the texture will make its way into your level editor and your levels.

I like to use the .ASE format as it offers the most versitility , after the model has been exported to an .ASE model it can be checked with a text editor to see if the texture locations are all correct and with a .ASE model it is not limited to as size in GTK so its possible to make huge models/structures and import them into your level editor, the beautiful thing about models is that they can be used for many different games, so you may make a statue for say Jedi Academy in .ase format then you start making levels for Quake4 and you want to use your lovely statue no problem you can, but you may want to add a normal map to the texture for that game though.