That's true. With mental ray or vray, there is no need for lightmaps or uvmapping a seperate uvsets for that. For a lot of reasons, using these offline renderers are way easier but they take longer to render.
It looks like you haven't learned the basic workflow. This should help http://cgi.tutsplus.com/series/an-introduction-to-uvmapping-in-3d-studio-max--cg-30940
nice tutorial, but uvmap of model not the best example how to make them(lots of wasted pixels) anyway, tut was about texturing, and you did it nice. thx
i would uvmap the highpoly, and render out an ao map without the floaters and then render out the aos for the floaters separately, and then bake the two like the normalmap to the lowpoly
my personal choice I would Disagree. I want to paint my models in 3D, and then get the barrings of where everything is on a uvmapping then do the details and what not
If that was possible, u could easily select faces in the 3d view and uvmap them to a trim sheet for example. Especially if the faces are many. If there was a script to do this that would be awesome :- )