This saved a lot of time once I relized you could do it. when texting your model split the model in half than make testures for the arms and legs I wouldn't texture the body as far as the upper torso and face wait until you dublicate the body back to a full body. what this does is makes the uvs for the arms and legs mirrored aswell and you don't have to waste time doing the arms and legs again. this process works with Maya not sure about Max or Blender.

another tip would be to work on your image about 2x the size of your uv texture size. That way when you do filters in photoshop they won't be so pixelated. once your done just resize the image back down to the origional uv size. example a 512 x 512 make the document 1024 x 1024 then revert it back once done

hope this little bit of info helps some one