Thought the Maya community might be interested in a (free) tool we just released for UV unwrapping, called "Boundary First Flattening (BFF)":
http://geometry.cs.cmu.edu/bff
It implements a bunch of tools from recent research papers that go far beyond standard angle-based/LSCM unwrapping, but haven't really been available in software until now. E.g., maps with no texture seam across cuts, or "cone singularities" that make it easy to generate a low-distortion unwrapping. It's also faster than standard UV algorithms, making it especially useful for high-res meshes (we can edit ~1 million triangles interactively).
It's free and open source (see link above for the GitHub repo), though since we're writing our own GUI code there's a fairly basic interface right now. It would not however be hard to add more standard features, like incorporating user-defined seams.
Anyway, let us know what you think!
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