Uv mapping = headache

I've been working on duplicating the Staff of Parthalan for a few days now. Sadly, I traced my shape off the original mesh because I really wanted the gem's branches perfect. So, they're set, but man, are they hard to make a UV map for.

The splines I used to trace and then fill out to make the branches no longer fit due to mesh smoothing (and the clean up/optimization that entails). I had them generate their own mapping coordinates prior to editable poly conversion, but they created rectangles (good) that didn't align with themselves (bad). Additionally, scaling them around to be seamless with the rest of the staff was difficult. So, I'm going back and breaking them off into elements again (had to collapse for smoothing to work right) in order to make selecting them easier.

Hopefully I'll have an epiphany on how to do this right. Otherwise, I'm going to break this up into multiple models, paint on them using Mudbox (never used it before), and assemble everything using nifskope.