Garbage UVs in Maya?

DirtyBlueFL

Anything other than UV by plane results in this trash. What the heck is going on here?
This image is from the auto-unwrap bonus tool, but automatic UVs result in even worse distortion.

DirtyBlueFL

The projection even shifts when I select and deselect the mesh in the viewer.

DirtyBlueFL

I solved this problem by extracting faces in large areas, UVing them, and then merging them all back into the main piece. Headache.

Treidge

I have something like this from time to time. Figured it's the issue with the Checker shader (built-in checker texture you're using) and not the UVs. So, when you see this - most likely your UVs are fine. You may want to use a regular checker texture as a workaround in such cases.