There's basically no way around to learn the basics of Blender or 3DS Max, whatever floats your boat. It helps tremendously to start with very limited goals and to focus to achieve these. Your example of a simple cube with differing uv mapping is already spot on, IMO.
On the subject of scaling the uv mapping, I will recommend a two phased approach: Read or watch a youtube tutorial on unwrapping the basic cube; second try it yourself and toy around with the scaling option (s) in the uv editor (try and error). Eventually the tutorials will make a lot of sense, hopefully.
For me the key to learning this (and other) stuff is to get sufficient experience with the interface and options in Blender, and then read the doc or watch youtube tutorials or ask a friend for a demo - it takes a while for everything to fall into place, though.
Good luck,
TeTeT
Check the Vietnam War Vessels thread 🙂 On the parking of the planes reversing direction, we worked around this by inverting the final speed vector in the parking table.
Cheers,
TeTeT
We experienced the same difference between 2.8 and 2.9 when developing parking spots for CVA-31 Bon Homme Richard. Not sure if this 180 degree reversal is for the better or not? We just swapped the speed (-4 for +4) to work around this behaviour.
Cheers,
TeTeT
TeTeT's post in Texture Scaling Help please? was marked as the answer