well i have the renderer set to mental ray, but whenever i render a pic none of the color comes out. any ideas?

ok i finally have maya and mental ray rendering images with global illumination. baking textures is easy but it seems like i can only get one side of the object to render to a texture. is there some sort of UV mapping tool built into maya that i am missing?

Yes, it's under window->UV texture editor and the uv edit tools are under edit polygons->texture.
The default uv map for a cube is really messed up(one face takes up the entire uvspace).