I hate UV mapping.
No, let me rephrase that. I really hate UV mapping. It's tedious, annoying, and (in my opinion) really hard. I've tried using UVMapper, but I never could figure out how to use it properly. So I do my UV mapping in Wings 3d. It takes as long or longer than the modeling process does.
Well, English Bob over at Morphography discovered a program that seems to work much better. (I don't know a lot about UV mapping programs, but at any rate it works much better than Wings.) It's called... wait for it...
Roadkill. Fitting name, in my opinion. Your mesh will be flattened like it had the misfortune to wander in front of a semi truck. I had spent almost a week of intermittent work on the UV mapping in Wings of a new content item I'm working on. Roadkill had the job done in one afternoon with wayyyyy less manual adjustment than Wings demanded.
Of course, Roadkill isn't perfect. The camera pan function in the 3D view demands a 3-button mouse, which is fine until you consider that I'm on a laptop with only two buttons. (By the way, Toshiba, you know I love you, but would it kill you to throw an extra button on there?!?) On a fairly simple model I was able to get the UV mapping done without panning the camera, but I've purchased a small mouse to help with larger and more complex models. The save function is somewhat lacking in functionality (e.g. if you use "Save As" to save your file as something other than the file you loaded it from, it doesn't remember the new name. You have to hit "Save As" and retype your new name every time, instead of using "Save As" once to rename the file and "Save" every time after.) Finally, it is Windows only. (Not a problem for me as I don't own any Macs, but a lot of people do and they won't be able to use Roadkill.)
That being said, the bottom line is that Roadkill makes UV mapping much easier. I wouldn't say it makes it "fun" (I;m not sure any utility could ever do that for me), but I'd definitely agree with "much less painful".
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