I’m proud to announce my first plug-in for Zbrush 3.1 - ProUV, advanced UV unwrapping optimized for sculpting. It gives a new spin to texture quality compared to GUV and AUV in all regards, and beats (boring) manual unwrapping in many regards.
First of all congrats. I bet this was a lot of hard work.
The thing is tho… what need is there in optimized uvs for sculpting?
Sculpting doesnt care about uvs its the maps and external renderer that do.
And there is where the problems start.
I admit that the uvs look a lot less messy than the guv and auv tiles
but still the cuts are placed randomly and will get a problem when
rendering normal and displacement maps i guess.
Unwrella is pretty similar but that also is only good for diffuse textures.
It says realtime usage friendly but i cant really believe it.
Even with really good uvs seams can be a mayor issue in realtime
renderes.
Anyways ill check it out and post some pics if it really works good.
Stu, I suggest you give it a shot - I’ve tried a couple of normal and displacement map renders and they all come out much, much better then GUV and AUV. It turns out to be a similar gain to diffuse texture polypaint example on the web page.
ye i get it 
Went to the site and download page – noticed that the plugin required Microsoft Direct X – so is it safe to assume that this plugin is for Windows OS only?
Yep, only Windows version for now. I’m considering MacOS port later on, if there is enough demand for it. You could use ‘parallels’ to run it, though?
Nope, no parallels or Boot Camp – since the 3.1.2 version of ZBrush for Mac is out, so is the temporary Windows licence for ZB. Can’t afford to pony up the cash for a second ZB license right now, in any case.
Best of luck with the plug in ! The comparision pictures really tell a great story about using your plugin.
just tried it out and while the uvs did look rather good for a single button click however it looked quite horrible once i stepped up in subdivisions 
seems like its changing the vertex order making the entire mesh explode like this
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Whoops, I’ll get that fixed. Thanks!
Beta 2 is out on the downloads page, with the already subdivided model explosion bug - fixed. 
Will this help me get differnt maps. Bump. Diffuse, Displacement, etc. into external renderers?
Because that is something I’ve yet been able to do. There are so many projects I want to render outside of Zbrush but just don’t get this UV thing.
can you say more about it, how does it select edges on witch it unwraps ?
It will raise the bump / displacement / etc. quality and perhaps even improve performance of the external rendering because UV map won’t be fragmented in thousands of separate chunks.
I suggest you give it a shot. (… and I’m curious about the results you’ll get, too, please post them over here if you have a bit of time to spare.)
EDIT:
Post edited. Question regarding internet connection answered by speedwym.
@slocik: Currently it does it algorithmically, to optimize both for least texture stretch and least number of separate chunks.
@Prosthesis: Because the “open beta” phase ends on 14.06.2009, it accesses the standard Internet Network Time Protocol (NTP, on port 13). This will be removed in the upcoming betas with a proper licensing system.
Would like to test it on OS X 
Thomas
Cool, edited previous post, Will try plugin from home from ousidte firewall.
Thanks! 
I hope you’ll manage to export models unwrapped by ProUV to external renderers. 
@Thomas_P: Maybe later this year. Perhaps use it in parallels for now? Would do good to post your wish to the official support forum - feature requests, it’s easier to track the feature demand over there.