Unrwapping the 3D Model from 3DS Max

I decided I would take the model I had in 3DS Max and attempt to unwrap it into a mesh that would be kind of like unfolding a cube. At least I thought it would be that easy, but after all the messing around making 81 models the UV mappings for my model looked like a scrunched up piece of paper. Well, even that's a understatement - it's not that hard unwrapping a scrunched up piece of paper. This was a nightmare.

So instead I've opted to segment the model into the pieces I want by selecting the individual polygons and breaking them away from the whole model and then rendering them individually in a render setup that remains consistent so that I don't lose the scale of the pieces in relation to each other

I then imported these renders into Illustrator and Live Traced them, but they again ended up looking like a dogs breakfast. This is when I realised I had another hurdle - in 3DS Max these parts that were rendered were still 3-Dimensional, so whilst I had the birds-eye-views of all the parts I had lost the depths of them all. There was no telling what scaling issues I would have in building this into a 3D model.....

To combat this, I scaled out a lot of the horizontal axis, but in the end there was really nothing I could do to get out perfect sections into Illustrator (and believe me, I tried my very best). This was always going to be a trial and error process.