You’re quite welcome. Actually, I explained this method in a tutorial on unwrapping a head on 3DSK’s site. But that was years ago, so I thought it was a good time to re-introduce it.
Haha… you know what kinda sucks?
I used the Texture paint layers add on to do the bump map i was so excited for…
And the bump map it creates is only a 1K Image! D:
fixing poles can be awkward, as they are often needed to direct edgeflows around the mesh so you cant really avoid them without changing the whole topology of the model, ho hum just make sure they dont appear in an area that is going to need much deformation!
the seams you had were pretty much ok, i removed the underneath ones as you saw, and htere were some that connected the under belly seam to the leg seam. theres no need to do that, a seam around the leg will cut the leg off anyway, connecting the seams like that just creates unnesaserry splits in the UV island. for the head i changed the inside of the mouth and made one of the head loops flow consistently around the inside of the jaw, in order to cut the inside of the mouth. there were a couple of seams in the mouth that didn’t make sense to me so i removed them too. the trick then was to unwrap each portion seperatly. starting with the body. once the bulk of the skin is laid out you can see where your limbs and head should go, also you can get a sense of the overall scale of the islands. you can see how the legs head and wings appear in relation to the body on the model so you can scale your uv islands down to an appropriate size on the uv grid. then, its just a case of fitting every thing onto the grid and painting.
bearing in mind that a large image will take proccessing time as you paint, dont try and just spray paint the whole model in one go, from a distance!