Ok, I was talking to a MAYA user today, and despite the fact that they told me how much they hated Blender, they let slip that they actually prefer it to Maya for UVing. Is it possible that Blender has better tools than software that costs thousands of dollars???
And yet everyone who doesn’t use Blender as a primary tool says it sucks. I don’t get it.
I prefer Blender to Maya simply because the interface is better, though many people say vice versa. It’s just difficult to get used to- people don’t persist enough to understand that it’s a lot faster.
Our UV tools are acknowledged as the best, though I never tried using the UV tools in other programs. I still find it a royal pain in the ass.
Well i can hear and read quite often that Blender offers the best UV mapping tools…
Have a go at Max’s UV mappnig (I did try 3 weeks long !) and you’ll regret it.
So in my opinion Blender has better UV mapping tools than a 4500 $ software !
(or i didnt find the right tools there)
I could do a decent unwrap in max, but with blenders seems and the new (replacing lscm, can’t think of the correct name now) unwrap, has left me kind of never having to edit it in the uv window afterwards, except for maybe moving the pieces to another layout and scaling everything up so less space is wasted. I haven’t tinkered enough with blender’s stitching and moving tools in uv to compare, but then again, I never have to because the unwrap is always sooo clean. I love it.
blender UV mapping rocks. In my work(a studio), recently a guy showed me the commercial UV Layout software, and showed me basically something very similar to blender(not so good). And people working in other softwares just watch that quite amazed(especially those working with MAX)
Blender has a lot of features that soar aove high priced apps…The UI is the first feature I love about Blender.
In Blender: Help–> Getting Started–> [browser opens with a link to Noob to Pro]–The first thing is Introduction to Blender’s UI.
Simply awesome.
At this current point in time, Blenders UV unwrapping is second to none (others have copied it now)
Cinema4D’s UV unrapping is quite good also. I have a demo copy and gave it a go with my head model the other day (was curious to see after reading somewhere that it’s UV unrapping is quite good), it unrapped beautifully without even adding seams. I was very impressed.
The new Cinema4D 10.5 version now has ABF unwrapping and I think Modo also has quite good unwrapping tools.
You know I stopped even thinking on UV mapping as a dificult process a long time ago (in blender), its so fast and there are so many great tools that its simply not a problem any more. If you find this statement weird just keep lerning and practicing
I wondering if anyone else out there besides Len and Lamoot has expierence with Cin4D’s Bodypaint. Coming from a C4D backgorund, I never really tried it, but it does seem to be very good from what I hear
As far Blender UV mapping, just like anything else in Blender, sometimes I love it and sometimes it ticks me off!! Depends on what I’m doing and how.
Blender’s LSCM ABF is awesome but it needs textures to be shown on meshes in edit mode and maybe manipulators/gizmos in the UV editor window.
get the latest svn build off of graphicall.org and you’ll see that that has already been taken care off… 
time ago Blender’s UV lacked a few features that made UV’ing a bit of a pain… this was till a few versions ago, but, since we have Multi-UV (thanks bretch!), and mesh-sync (thanks Campbell!), UV is easy as taking candy from a baby.
There is no documentation yet AFAIK, downloading the latest SVN from graphicall.org, or compiling one by yourself, will let you know about this
Is there any possible way to export/import multiple UVs to other apps? What is mesh-sync?
This was mentioned in this thread http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=106590 just a couple of days ago by me.
It seems Cinema4d and Blender have the best UV tools, long may it live.
I uv map every thing, characters or objects, with this tool : www.unwrap3d.com
And I really like it. Even using it houses where they use Max for all…never enjoied much max Uv Editor Window. IMO , Unwrap3d is more powerful in that area than Max, by far.
I am such a dumb sack of bricks, sometimes… The thread is about “UV” and I commented about “UI”. “V” is waaaay at the other end of the alphabet.
That’s why I suck at python, I lack attention to detail…Obvious detail. [shoots self in foot]Bam![/puts foot in mouth]
Blender UV system is better than the one in max and maya , … IMHO … 
If I remember right, there was an incident a while ago because Maya integrated LSCM unwrapping but didn’t comply with the GPL - by making Maya licensed under the GPL.
I haven’t used many other 3d packages besides Blender, but I really like its UV-mapping. Anymore, unwrapping a game model for our Sokoban game only takes about 20 minutes (if that long!).