After some searching for good UV layout programs I finally bought UV layout yesterday and I must say it's a breeze to work with in combination with Maya. Previously I used flat colored shaders most of the time because of my limited knowlegde about UV's. The most important thing i still need to learn is where to place the seams and texturing in photoshop. The new version of Zbrush with the UV master plugin seemed like a nice quick solution but I love the control of creating seams and cuts myself and have more control on the flattening proces too.
Here is a quick rendertest I did of an character I created for an old project.
