Ok, now that my uv's are laid out almost, (hehe... I said laid, hehe..)
I'm not done yet, but I wanted to ask you now befor I continue to possibly uv myself into a corner that I cant get out of.

Below is a shot of them on my unsmoothed cabin to my ship model. (not quite done tweaking details yet tho.

Eventually, I wanna have the pieces welded together to make one big piece, (like you did on your test character)
..or even a few large pieces, so I can export it to PS, paint it, then import it back to Maya.

I wanted to ask if I'm starting with a LOT of shaders, then I join all the major UV pieces that can be joined, how do I know what shader belongs to the lager, newly joined UV piece(s)?

..so that I can know what shader to put the image onto.

Thanks for any info!