Ok, this is basically my first almost completed model. I've done a few others, but this is the closest I've come to a completed character that I might animate. I know it looks simple, but it took me quite awhile and I learned quite a bit. I've sort of run into a brick wall as far as texturing goes. I've scoured the web for tutorials, and found very few and most are simply texturing a head or something simple. I have this character model, and I need some advice on some sort of work flow in dealing with projection mapping. I know it may not seem very complicated, but its giving this n00b trouble! I did a cylindrical projection and ended up with this monstrosity. Any advice is appreciated as I'm pretty much stuck. I know I can't be taught texture mapping in this forum, I just want some quick advice on how others would go about this, maybe start me off on the right track. I think I may have to go out and pick up a book on the subject.
Since you are just getting your feet wet you could do a fairly decent job of texturing this guy with a planar projection map either from the side. To get fancier you would select groups of faces and give them their own projection type.
There are some decent poly texturing tutorials in the links in my sig below. check them out.
Ah, thank you. All I needed was a way to get some color on this damn thing so I wouldn't feel so stuck.
Let me just make sure I'm clear on one thing. When you say I can give different faces different projections, you mean I can select the head and give it a spherical, the arms and legs individually with cylindrical, and maybe the torso with a planar? That seems to make sense to me. If that is the case, will Maya alert me if I select the same faces in the different projections? Will I have to take all these separate and different projections and stitch them to together?
Thanks for the quick response. Now I have some things to play with again 
will Maya alert me if I select the same faces in the different projections
No
Actually you can have all the faces using the same planar projection but it's how they are laid out in the UV editor that makes a difference. They can be arranged so thatb they do not overlap.. THi sis tricky an doff the top of my head I can;t tell you one way to go abou tit but there are definately some tips int he links.
I've recently updated my web page and added a tutorials section. Although I still need to find a lot more time to write some more, the only one on there so far is a UV tutorial. It might help you out.
Richard
OK, thanks guys. I think i have a clearer understanding of how projection mapping works. My texture is pretty sloppy, but I get the idea and with trial and error I can get the colors in the right place. I think I may need to isolate the extruding eyebrows in order to keep the color off the forehead.
I have few more questions. Is their anyway to isolate section of a model to apply a shader to just those faces? i was thinking it would be nice to use one of the premade skin shaders from this site. And what about other effects, such as changing the luminosity or color gain on certain sections of the model? Would this be accomplished through alpha channels in order to mask out different areas? Thanks.
Simply select some faces and assign the texture to the selected faces only instead of the whole mesh. Doing this you also only need a UV set for the selected faces, and not have the whole mesh laid out in 0 to 1 UV space. Basicaly I mean you can have overlapping UV's if the overlap are different textures.
Richard
I was messing around with different projection types, and all of a sudden something strange seemed to start occuring. You can see, on this shot of my uv textures, that theirs a strange "staggering" along the edges of the UVs. It's cutting off parts of the image and leaving white streaks on the hardware render of my model. This wasn't occuring before; the images would display in their entirity within the uv texture editor. These white streaks don't seem to render, its just making it dificult to observe imperfections in my texture map, so I can then edit them in photoshop. Is this simply a video card issue, or is it something else.
Also, i've been using tif images for my texture. Is this the best option?
tiffs usually work fine for textures..... tgas are good too. You may want to try Danny's Uv Tools. They make laying out UVs a piece of cake. I can lay out UVs with those tools in a fraction of the time it took me before. I think they are in the script section of this site.