Yep, I think my evil plan was to take just the leg and foot and make a special purpose stocking UV map. That map will not be optimized to be as distortion free as possible but to have just the distortion and alignment one would expect on a stocking. If I want the vertical lines to align property as well, I'll probably have to do it by hand. But since it's just a small, relatively simple part of the figure, that should be manageable.

Then if the required resolution is not too high, I think I could actually use the existing UV chart as the geometry and render that using the new UVs to produce an image map. If that works, I can even give you that object and you can render your own maps using whatever shader you think is best.

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