Maya's UVW tools

When using Maya's default UVW tools, it can be a bit stressful. This is where I turned to custom plugins. In this case I will be using UV Deluxe 1.1. A custom UVW editor Maya Mel Script from Creative Crash. It makes life a little bit easier (hopefully) when unwrapping complex models.

Here's the basic UI. All UVW shells can be rotated, aligned, normalized, matched and scaled with the simple click of a button.

Here are the UVW maps for the rocket launcher. I made this texture map 2048x1024 to accommodate for the many pieces of the model. To suffice for this, in Maya you must shrink the entire UVed faces in the UV editor on the horizontal axis by 50% and center it to the 1024x1024 grid space. Once exported as a 2048x1024 pixel texture map it will stretch to the correct aspect ratio and pixel density.