Most people learn to unwrap all/most of the character on to one huge unwrap sheet. It's how I learned it, and until I actually started working in a real game studio, it was the way I always did it. One big texture sheet is not a very good idea for us though. There are a few reasons. First of all, the largest texture size that we were ever allowed to use when working on PS2 was 256x256. The largest texture size we've ever been able to use on PSP is only 128x128. Now when you're texture can only be 128x128 in size, sqeezing the entire charater into that space will result in very blurry low-res textures.

So instead, we segment the character up into pieces and each piece gets it's own unwrap and it's own texture.

The Shoes get a 64x64 map. The legs get a 128x128. The torso gets a 128x128, the arms get a 128x128, the hands get a 64x64 and the head gets a 128x128.

Some would agrue that it costs more power for the engine to read multiple textures, but that difference is nominal, and when the visual result is significantly better, it's worth it.

Another reason a studio might have for having each piece have seperate textures is if they were using a swapable part system, or custimizable characters. Then having each piece with it's own texture is the best idea anyways.

So, with this in mind, I split the character up into a few pieces.

I selected the polys of the feet and it the Detach button. You can name them (I named them "Shoes") or you can leave it alone, it's up to you. I did the same thing with the sleeves, and named them "Arms".

Once all the pieces are seperated, I got the unwrapping texture ready. I use a simple checkerboard texture. Some people get more elaborate, having multi-colored squares with numbers or letters in them (it makes it easier to see if something needs to be flipped horizontal if you have numbers, etc. in the squares) but in this case, I don't feel anything too special is nessecary.

Open the Material Editor by pressing the M key. Choose any blank material sphere and click the little Square button next to Diffuse. A list will appear and from it, choose "Bitmap" and then it will open the standard windows file finder and you can pick your texture here. Above I have the checkerboard I use, you can save it and use it.

Once you have the material setup, click the button in the material editor (in row of buttons along top, just under all the spheres) so that the texture will show in the viewport. Then Select all of the parts of the character and click the assign button to assign the material to those objects.

The result will look something like the image above. The objects don't currently have any UV unwrapping done to them, so everything is a mess. This makes the texture appear all stretched and distorted on the object.