Good tips. Also check out CrazyButcher's LCSM Unwrap script, much better than Max's Pelt. http://www.luxinia.de/index.php/ArtTools/3dsmax And James Haywood has some similar alignment scripts, plus a couple more. http://jhaywood.com/maxScripts.htm Edit.. MoP you should also point to your Normalize UVs script, very handy…
You are just blind. :) Max's Relax tools are considerably better than Maya's. The only thing Max lacks which I'd like from Maya is the "Map UV Border" tool, but just using Max's Relax overcomes this 99% of the time. You'll find it in Tools -> Relax, set Amount to 1.0 and Iterations to about 200, hit Apply and your UVs will…
Also i dunno which version you are using but turbounwrap gives a lot more options to the default unwrap modifier (not sure if they improved in 2009) http://www.chuggnut.com/Scripts/TurboUnwrap/TurboUnwrap_Max9.rar