Decal and Glow - Blender 2.62

Kalshion

I'm currently working on a project that involves a starship that I modeled a little awhile ago, the problem I am having is being unable to get the decal (the ships name and its serial number) onto the model. I thought I knew how to do it, but since I rarely use UV maps well... I've run into a brick wall.

I did some experimenting with a sphere and a cube, in an effort to try and understand what I'm doing wrong but to no avail. Even though I get the image to show up in the UV Maps (thanks to some help from people on Blenders foundation boards) I've still be unable to actually get it to show up on the model itself. Not sure what is causing the problem.

My second issue, is an engine glow. My ship uses gravity to move it, and because of it, it leaves a sort of 'wake' behind it. I thought of using Nodes to do this, but much like with UV's, I don't use nodes very often and thus have forgotten how to get the glow effect to work. I 'did' manage to get the glow to work two years ago (when I last asked about it) but I've completely forgotten 'how' I got it to work...

I did try to look for tutorials again, and I do recall finding a link on this site that pointed to a node tutorial but it was for an older version of Blender.

L2K

well, if you want text as a decal, your text face simply need to be just over the object face a tiny tiny bit. if they are at same place, you'll get shading errors. if its under, you'll just get nothing.
and your texture will need transparency. photoshop and gimp can generate alpha, wich is what you need for transparency. png, tif and tga are best for that. (photoshop is a pain with tga, so go with tif or png)