UVW Unwrap creates too many seperate pieces

[Anonymous]

Hey guys, quick question. During a previous college project when we first did UV Unwrapping, unless i'm mistaken i remember unwrapping each limb/section seperately somehow and then just rearranging them in the Texture editor to be exported and painted in Photoshop. But now i have another character to unwrap and i have no clue ho to do it. I've tried unwrapping the entire merged model but then the texture Editor is a complete mess which would take me hours just to heal all the pieces together. Just want to know if there's something i can/ should be doing to lessen the number of piece, or tutorials for seperate projections/unwrapping?

Assigning Unwrapping:

Then in the Texture Editor this mess appears:

As you can see, there's no way i'm going to sit and manually weld all these tiny pieces together...

Any help at all would be insanely appreciated, also, i need it kinda urgently

Thanks..

[Anonymous]

Well it looks like you have a lot of seams. One trick would be to not do full cuts, and have a couple of edges connecting the islands when you do the unwrap. That might help.... Like tearing up clothes at the seam, but not completely, so you flatten your clothes out as one piece of cloth.