Of course this is a quick example so it still needs work, but the whole thing took like 15 mins. At no point did i have to touch the high rez mesh and i can keep tweaking the low rez mesh till i get a perfect map on the high rez one. Once you have a proxy you like, you can also reuse it for other meshes. If you have trouble working on the whole mesh, you can cut it into parts and combine their maps in the end.

IIRC the full V4 body map i use now took me about 2-3 days with this method.

Hope it helps someone and that it convinces more people to take a look at XSI. There's lots of cool tools like this in it.