Dunno any tutorials off hand, sorry, but I can answer the multiple materials. Just select the faces you want to put a material on, then in the hypershade middle click and drag the material node you want to apply to them. You can put as many materials on one mesh as you'd like that way. [edit]Oh, and if you don't want your…
Hello flaagan, here's some page that helped me a lot when i was learning UVs under Maya (im still a newbie) but it was a lot of help watching some of the videos and playing with the scripts. http://www.cheuk-lee.com/tutorial%20Site/EasyUVTutorial.htm http://sunitparekh.com/pelting/
Have you tried Digital Tutor's free tuts? I mostly combine planars and cylindricals. On higher poly stuff I use the paint selection tool like crazy, and sometimes I use the look throught camera option for the planar orientation. Yeah, select shell in the uv editor is great. I find I have to tweak with the relax settings a…