The hand will be much harder to unwrap then the previous objects we've done up to this point. It has a lot more little tweaking. Just use all of the knowledge that you've gained up to this point on the previous parts and do your best. And remember, it never hurts to just start over on the unwrapping. You learn from every mistake you make.
Here's basically what I did...
First I selected the body of the hand (both top and palm) and did a cylindrical map. Rotated, moved, and scaled the gizmo till it fit around the hand like in the image below.
Next I selected all the fingers and did a planar map on them all at once.
I Clicked the Edit button to open the edit window. In the main view port I selected the top of the hand and all the fingers like in the image below. The in the Edit UVs window, I Detached (Ctrl+d) the selected faces from the rest of the hand, flipped them horizontally, and moved them off to the side.
In vertices select mode, I moved and target welded the palm and top of hand so that they were connected along one side (the side opposite the thumb).
Then I did the same with the fingers, scaled the fingers down so they matched up with the palm of the hand and lined them up next to each other.
I moved, and target welded the vertices until I had the whole body of the hand and the fingers combined together in one unit.
For the thumb, I did two planar unwraps. It seems like a cylindrical map would work, but the thumb is just such an odd shape and curves in an odd fashion that it makes the cylindrical map more of a headache to deal with then just combining two planars.
Don't worry if edges don't line up very well, and don't be afraid to move things around a lot. They'll still look okay in the final texture as long as you keep the general size and shape so the faces close to their original unwrap.
Once I had both the hand and thumb unwrapped, I combined them together to reduce the number of seams. It's best if you can get the top of the thumb/hand combined together and leave the seam in the palm since it won't be as visible there.
Once I was finished, I used the freeform tool to scale the hand to fill the entire box. The hand is really stretched by doing this, but my intention is to have the hand be a rectangle rather then a square texture.
To do this, in the Render UVs window, I enter the dimensions 256x128, and when I click the Render UV Texture button, the map it generates is rectangular instead of the stretched square.
3DTotal
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Hands are done! All that's left is the head:
Once again - same-o-same-o. Select the head, put on an Unwrap UVW modifier, expand the + and choose Face selection mode, select the whole head and click the cylindrical button.
Move, rotate, and scale the cylindrical projection gizmo using the normal move rotate and scale tools, until the checkerboard texture looks best.
Click the Cylindrical button again to deactivate it, and click the edit button. By default it will look something like this:
To conserve texture space, we'll want to mirror the whole head. If you really need to do some asymmetrical texture work for the head (like if the character had a big scar or something) then you may want to leave some areas un-mirrored. But for this, we're just going to mirror everything that can be.
So switch to vertex selection mode, select half the back of the head, Detach (Ctrl+D) Flip it horizontally, and move it over top of the other half of the head.
We also need to avoid any over-lapping areas. The ear has several parts that overlap others, so just grab the vertices and pull them outwards so that nothing is overlapping anything else.
