Mastering UVs!

At the beginning I thought that my scene and the whole animation was going to be really simple because middling the Russian dolls wasn't much of a hassle. My initial idea was to animate their faces to enhance the expression of the movements and give them a nice personality but in order to do that I needed a proper UV mapping for the models. Now I've done UV mapping before (on 3d Max) but never came across with something as problematic as this.
It might be my lack of experience with this software or that I just cant retain any information but it took me three sessions to finally get the hang of it (that plus my file getting damage and causing me to do all over again).

 


Because of their round parts at the top both the inside and the outside, it require to cut the edges on the UV editor, then cut the edges on the back spine of the main model just to manage to properly unfold the figure into something that I could easily work on photoshop and after effects to get image sequence for the faces.
After finishing this I completely feel like the master of UVs... I just hope that I don't screw up with animating them since they all have different emotions during the whole animation.

I really hope the rest of the process works with easement since I'm tuning out of time for the final critic.