Like peeling an orange

Unwrapping is a bitch.
This bitch is tamed. For now.

The UV was made with the low res mesh, but this is the smoothed mesh in the image above. Below is the unwrapped texture we'll be working with. Resolution is at the moment, double what we need for double resolution of the final product. See where the close-ups take us.

So that means we have:
4096 px square

We should work on:
2048 px square

We will render at:
1024 px square

Preview textures can be:
512 px square