I know vilters likes to set up material zones on a character as simply as possible, but I do not reccomend doing that unless you plan on using the character in another program that requires a small amount of material zones.

If you make the body all one map, adding thing like reflections to the nails requires masks and comlex shader nodes to do so. It also makes it next to impossible to seperate SSS of things like the nails and fingers. Not to mention the face and internal parts of the mouth.

There are plenty of scripts available to make working in the material room far easier. If you have 6 material zones that use the same map you can paste to all of them at the same time. It does not make it much harder than working with a small amount of material zones.

As far as grouping the mesh for body parts, you don't have to do that. But be warned that using a single group mesh requires rather complex rigging. It will have to be entirely weight mapped and every map will list the entire vertex list. IE, it will be a rather large cr2. Single skin also makes selecting body parts in the preview impossible unless a prop is also loaded that allows you to select it. Think breast bones in many characters that do not have geometry, you have to select body parts like that in a pull down menu. Antonia~WM and V4~WM load props so you can select those joints in the preview. It is far easier to just assign the body parts in the mesh and do it that way, but not a requirement. If you want anyone else to use it, assign parts to it.

Magnets on a mesh are personal choice. The idea of magnets started before we had animatable origins. You can use magnets to fake that, or in conjunction with animated centers. Keep in mind that using magnets adds to the complexity, and requires that the magnets affect be copied into anything conformed to it. You can also rig a character entirely with just magnets, but that gets a tad confusing.

Using the diffuse texture to create bump maps works for some things, but not for others. One of them is skin, it does not make for very realistic skin when you do that. For instance, if the creases in the fingers are painted into the textures, they will appear to be very ruff when doing it this way. Another reason to have multiple material zones. Nipples look odd when done that way as well. I use a lot of textures that have tattoo's, and tattoo's are not supposed to bump... If you want decent detail from bump, use a real bump map.

Try to get nipples and skin like this procedurally... Yes it can be done, but it is far easier to just use a bump map and be done with it.

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