Okay, I've seen quite a few tutorials on how to do texture mapping but I havn't come across one that covers how to take a single 2D texture and map it over a complex 3D object, kinda like how you would with like a 3D character. Can somebody point me in the right direction?

Well for complex models like a 3D character, the most common way is to use a modeling program and skin the texture(not sure thats the correct term) but anyway in 3DS you would set the textures to the polygons you want and then save the model. Now in the code basically you are loading the texture coordinates that were saved for each polygon so it can access the texture in the areas that were mapped to each polygon. Not sure if this makes sense....


Basically look at a font tutorial where they use a single texture and you get the texture coordinates to map to the letter you want to display. HTH

The word you're looking for is "uv unwrapping". Look at the Blender site, they have a video tutorial on that.