Quote - Antaran,  Like your model so far. Here are my comments.

Thank you! All your comments are extremely helpful. Most are straight forward, but the shading/UV-related stuff I still have some questions about:

Quote - You don't have to UV Map it as it looks okay now, maybe add another "Basic Layer" on top of the handle in the Texture Room with an opacity of 50% or something . Layered shaders can add depth to your textures.

Could you tell me more about the layered shaders, please? Right now I am confused. Are you talking about a multi-channel mixer shader where one of the multi-channels is replaced with a basic layer (for color?) Or am I totally misunderstanding the concept?

Quote -   Here is a quick way to UV Map something in the VM room with multiple meshes.1.Shift + Select one "Edge" from each of you separate polymeshes in the vm room.

2.Dynamically extrude these edges , doesn't matter how much.

3.Ctrl+shift+w  and weld all the selected points together. You should be left with a single vertex.

4.Delete this Vertex.

 What we did here is connect all of our polymeshes into 1 polymesh but they are still separate polymeshes for selection purposes.

5.Now double click the entire polymesh ,click the UV icon in the VM room and choose Operations/Box/6 sided mapping.

Your whole object should be mapped although you could scale the UV's if you want.

  This is a very neat method of uniting the mesh parts for UV mapping. I'll definitely adopt it. It din't work very well for this particular model though. I UV-mapped the 3 main parts which might require complex shading. (It's the UV1 version on the server)

I wouldn't be able to tell people how I did it though... I just kept messing with it until my UV shader starrted to look somewhat right. Still not perfect.