Oh, I know Cycles and BI materials are separate. I am almost always in Cycles mode and almost always work with only Cycles materials. The only reason that file is different is because in the full version (which has all layers full of something and several different pieces for different purposes) I did some texture painting, and all the tutorials I’ve looked at so far said to do that in BI mode. Frankly, it’s caused so many problems, and texture painting seems to work in Cycles mode (knock on wood), so next time I’m going to try just avoiding BI mode.
Yes, I use test images in many of my Cycles materials to preview my UV mapping. Again, that’s something I do all the time with no problem, even after exporting.
I get your meaning now about the Cycles materials. Actually, I prefer that way. It’s much more convenient for me to be able to leave the test image in my materials and export it plain than have to eliminate those every time I want to export. I’ve never found material translation in any app much more than a bare beginning. I always end up building new materials, and I usually have to change paths for textures. So, generally speaking, I usually (though not always) prefer materials not to export.
Oh, I know which image was referenced in the OBJ export. That’s why I knew it could find the image- I used it in my background. And you’re right, it was almost definitely a sort of bug. I think it was brought about by my switching into Bl mode and loading the image in the UV/Image Editor once (and I thought getting rid of it there afterward), and the horrible BI practice of attaching textures to a material if you load them in the UV/Image window.
I hope that changes one day. Just because you want to look at an image doesn’t mean you want it to be part of the materials in the object you’re working on. We have two different interfaces to add images to a material if we want. I got rid of that image afterward, but it still kept the association. I think I just hadn’t selected every single face when I replaced it, because when I did that as IkariShinji suggested, it worked. But frankly, it never should have happened. All I wanted to do was look at a reference image while not in front or side view. I should be able to do that without changing my materials. Adding an image to the UV/Image Editor window should have nothing to do with materials. That, or they should separate the two purposes: UV Editing and Image Editing, and also update the material editing interfaces to reflect the automatic change.
Yes, I can see how deleting the UV map would work, but since I often find making a good UV map by far the most time consuming aspect of working in Blender and I’d already had to work on that one twice, it wasn’t worth it. It was quicker to edit the OBJ and MTL files in Geany, though that was a fix that needed work each time I exported. I’m very grateful to IkariShinji for finding another solution.
Thanks for the tip! I think I heard about that before, but I totally forgot.