Here is one of the many ways to organise uv map unwrap for a character in max. There are heaps of better ways, but like I say, just wanted to share in case it helped anyone.
I wanted to share this one because its a really visceral and understandable way of mapping your average chunky game character, and if your new to it, it will help you get your head around the problem a little.
The problem is that you can often loose track of what you have unwrapped, and occasionally find lost triangles. This technique avoids that.
COLOUR PANEL UV MAPPING
*What we are going to do is unwrap a model into a bunch of planes, then stitch these together into coherant 'pelts' aka uv elements.
*start by making a multi-sub material with about twenty materials in it. Quickly change the diffuse colours so that they are all quite different. So you have like a red, a blue, a yellow, a green, a dark green etc etc. Make the first material a god awful bright colour such as magenta.
*Apply this to your character. If he doesnt go completely magenta, select the whole character and change his material id to 1. As we assign materials, the magenta (channel 1) is going to be our reminder that we havent 'done' that poly yet.
*Ok, so now what you need to do is apply a different material ID to the rough planes of the character. (side of head, front of head, top of head, back of head, under chin, front torso, back torso, top of shoulder plates, under shoulder plates, front arm, back arm, under upper, hand under, etc etc). You can do this quickly by using the "ignore edges" mode in emesh or "by angle" mode in epoly to get the main selections.
*your character should now look like a rainbow with none of the first material showing.
*Look for any loose polys or jagged edges and tweak the material IDs until you have nice clean planes. Some of these will be your seams, so its good to keep them neat.
*Ok, so now lets get some uvs on the model. Apply a uvw planar map and slide it off so that it is outside the bounds of the character. This will get any junk out of the square where we do our unwrapping.
*Ok so now apply a uvwunwrap modifier and open the sub-object "face" (hit the little + sign in the stack box. Dont open the edit tool yet, we will be working with just the rollout to begin with. If you look, UVWUNWRAP has a select by material id option. We are going to use this to quickly select those panels we coloured earlier on.
*once you have the first panel selected you will notice a gizmo sitting over the area... this is a planar map. If you look there are options to change this planar map to x,y,z and so on, so forth. Generally the automatic one will give you an ok result if your planes are nice and simple. Click the apply map button.
*repeat this step until you have done all the ids.
*Ok, now pop open the edit window and take a look. Each of your panels is now layed out on the page, but are overlapping and are rotated and scaled all funny.
*If you click on the little red triangle, it will show only selected faces. Again, use the select by id to get each panel and you can rotate and tweak it without the other junk getting in the way. If you look at the selection set window at the top you will also find max has created a selection set for each panel too!
*Once you have your parts orientated and scaled correctly (you can throw out the material now and go back to a checker map if you like) you can then stitch edges and generally weld up stuff to your hearts content. This is a few tutes in its own right.
Hope this helped anyone.
Sounds interesting, have to try it out sometime :)