I'm with you guys [the cools one, not the haters :P], I enjoy UV mapping. Not nessecarily the making seams part, but actually packing the UV charts to get the most out of the space available, that's where the funs at. Its very much like a good puzzle.

I use both the PLG plug-ins for LW and I've done a lot of UV'ing with Blender. Blender is fantastic for organic UV's, I'm not so keen on it for mechanical stuff tho. Sometimes it gets a little wonky with the way it unwraps otherwise straight edges. LW handles both quite well with the plug-ins.

 

pauljs57 - You are on the right track in one regard, the textures, much like the paint on the cars you mention, can really make or break a model. I've seen loads of awesome models destroyed by shoddy textures, and a truly masterful texture can go along ways towards saving even the lousiest of models. I've also found the quality of the UV often [strongly] influences the quality of the texture as well. Poor choices in seam placement, mismatched scaling, stretching, etc can really hamper your efforts to make a decent texture.

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