bottom persp

no offence ctbram, but that looks like a pretty easy model to unwrap UVs for.

as others have suggested just pick the faces for one plane, planar map them and then pull the UVs to one side before you tackle anything else. then planar map the side planes and move them to one side. if you are remapping areas you've already layed out than sure you're going to have a problem... but really...how can you not know what you've already mapped?

As for dealing with areas that you've extruded, such as the yellow square extrusion on the yellow plane, i would select the face nearest the camera, ctrl backclick to change to UVs and then use the scale tool to pull those UVs in and then use shift > to move up the hierachy to pull the next loop of UVs in and so on... but really, as Mike said, that's only if you are majorly concerned about stretching.

to constantly complain about something taking a long amount of time when you are just beginning to learn it is just unnecessary - I mean obviously it's going to take a long time because you've just started learning it, but it's not like it's always going to take 50 hours.

as for the help files, i have to agree with gster on that one, I find them pretty helpful and certainly not that bad when it comes to techno babble.

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Just and Idea, and I have done this with easy success, select the faces you want to UV at one time, and automap them. In your UV editor, simply sew everything together. Do that or all areas of your model. This way you wont have to worry about a huge mess to figure out out to put together. All your doing is working with one side at a time.

Here is an exmple of a cube I auto mapped from one side. I just selected all the faces on that one side and simply automapped it.

Here is the UV map. Everything is allready sewn together here BTW.

Not sure if this plug-in will be of help to you or not but I have used it for nearly all my uv layout work and it has saved me a great amount of time.

http://www.pullin-shapes.co.uk/page8.htm

hope it helps

Excellent find leonlabyk!!!:beer: That plugin is a real time saver, especially for human modeling. So easy to install and use. I hope your reading this ctbram, it should work great with your mech.

Here is a practic head that I unwrapped with it.

also a good tool is unfold, after you sellect uv border vertex check the pin borders, then unfold,
check pin unselected vertex then unfold.

Meaning all your edges that look stretched will become less stretched as they will be reconfigurated according to the geometry in 3D