UV Refresher please -- Can Dynamic lighting make UV's irrelevant (at the cost of performance)?

Topology doesn’t really matter that much for UVs. Though the more convoluted your surfaces are the more effort it might take to make it look good. The important factor is deciding where to make cuts in the UV mesh. Choose edges where you don’t mind having a seam, and cut them so that the UV unwrap function can open up your model into a mostly flat shape automatically. Kind of like making a papercraft model in reverse. It doesn’t have to be perfect because the auto unwrap function can use a bit of distortion to flatten the details.

If your model is purely convex, you might also be able to get away with just using a sphere projection, which is totally automatic, though wastes texture space and makes the detail level uneven.