Why is this UV map going horribly wrong? So, I've created a little light-saber, (I got the idea from here, but I got carried away and my model looks nothing like the video.)
Feel free to download the file here.
...The UV unwrapping, sadly, has been a disaster.  The output makes so little sense it could've strained Euler's short term memory, because I have no idea what &quot;piece&quot; (what are those called again?) of the UV map goes where on the model.
My model looks like this:'

I got some effect out of applying scale, as the unwrap is no longer some huge distortion extending several times the length of the grid, but still utterly useless.

As you can see, most people won't be able to see how this was unwrapped.  At the moment I only have three seams, onet is along the &quot;bottom&quot; of the shape directly under the one asymmetrical part (the protrusion visible to your right.)  The other two are on either side of the protrusion, but instead of red lines I see thick black lines:

in one of the places I want the seam (I assume I want seams about asymmetries.)  I don't know what these black lines mean and I can't tell if there is any seam there.
Thanks for the help!
The issue here is the angle from which you performed the Cylindrical projection. UV projections behaves differently according to the angle from which you're looking at your model. In this case, you should project from the angle that represents the length of your cylindrical object, which in your case is the top view.



You can also simply use the UV unwrap (U > Unwrap) to get a nice map according to the seams you created: