Thanks for the suggestion, pitklad. That's actually one of the variants I looked at. Even more than the space economy, I like that it avoids the extra seam at the collar bone. The problem is that with the UVLayout demo, I can't make symmetric layouts automatically, and with the unfolding you suggest I have to position the arms manually, and the whole thing ends up really assymetric. That's part of the reason I'm looking for an alternative tool now. The other is that I can't figure out how to move vertices manually in UVLayout.

I understand how RoadKill is supposed to work. It just doesn't on my machine. Even UVLayout gets unresponsive sometimes, but usually it wakes up after a while. Roadkill simply freezes, and there's nothing at all I can do. So, yeah, that's that.

I think the thing for me to do now is learn Blender. It may take a while, but its UV mapping looks really powerful and seems to have all the features I am currently missing or don't know how to access. Also, I can run it natively on Linux and don't have to use a virtual machine. I'm assuming that that causes a lot of the problems I'm having with 3d software for Windows. Fortunately, Poser is fine, mostly. There are some minor glitches, but they don't keep me from doing what I need to do.

-- I'm not mad at you, just Westphalian.