Lastly, here's the hand that I've been working on.

Some things to note:

1) I haven't begun on the middle, ring or pinky fingers :p :blush:

2) My UVs here have a bit of a "ripple" look to them; that's something to keep an eye out for.

3) The UVs here hav a bit of a "ripple" and are stretched.

4) Seams

Those are bound to happen; it's a conflict that occurs when the 3D space of modeling and the 2D space of texturing collide.

In this case, you have two options:

a) Ignore the seam, and lay out the UVs so that the hand UVs are uniform and the finger UVs are uniform, and when the time comes to paint your texture, you're careful about how you paint.

or

b) Lay out the UVs for the hand and the finger, and if you are not going to sew them (you can't sew everything :p ), adjust the placement of the finger UVs so that they have continuity with where the finger meets the hand.



Miscelaneous tips and tricks:

1) Holding "v" and middle-mouse-clicking in the UV window will snap UVs to UVs; exactly like snapping things to vertices while modeling. This is handy when you go about sewing seams together.

2) Keep seams where no-one's going to see them, if you can help it.

3) Sometimes UVs get flipped, and textures on faces appear "backwards." If this is the case, select the UVs that make up the backward faces, and in the UV window, choose Polygons -> Flip UVs -> Options, and choose either horizontal or vertical flipping.

4) You can also scale selected UVs "inside out" to achieve the same effect as #3

5) When using planar projections, make sure you are selecting the correct axis.

Not only that, but make sure the axis you are selecting corresponds with the actual axis you want to project along.

By default, Maya is a "Y up" world/space. You can change this, but be sure that you are aware of your change and choose the appropriate axis when making planar projections.