You don't always need to unwrap your meshes to get good uvs for texturing. Sometimes its fine to do stuff like make subobject selections and apply UVW map modifiers to get basic uvs working on the arms, chest, face etc.. then collapse them into the stack, or just planar map a characters face from the side and deal with the stretching down the middle, I read an article by pascal blanche once explaining how he made an image by mapping his whole character with a planar UVW map aligned to his camera he then painted all the textures flat in photoshop, meaning he couldnt view it from other angles but the still image looked awesome.

Recently I've been using z-brush GUV tiles to generate uvs and painting all my textures in z-brush which is a great pipeline for displacement and normal maps aswell as colour.

I think its important to understand whats going on with UV space though, so its not so tedious when things go strange.

---