Well you can kind of pelt in Maya. You apply a planar map to a favorable angle, then break edges as if plotting seams and relax. Or you can hunt around for some mel scripts. http://lab.hydralab.com/blog/pelting/ Here is one of the more popular Mel scripts I remember off the top of my head. There could be more floating…
Hopefully you made that out of splines and remembered to check on auto generate UV's before poly modeling. If not I agree it could be a good candidate for pelt or spline mapping. If you're using 3dsmax you can try peel in renderhjs textools script. You could also auto unwrap it and stitch edges together and relax as you go…