Special thanks to Pooby on Spinquad.com and James Willmott for originally developing the technique.

I read some people in forums discussing a technique like this and decided to write up a tutorial on creating quick UV maps. It may require minor adjustments when finished, but should give you a really nice starting off point. I'm using a head, but it should work with other parts of the body or objects as well. This tutorial was written using Lightwave 3D 8.3 on Windows XP and the techniques described may not work with earlier versions, it was also written assuming that the reader has at least a working knowledge of Lightwave 3D. As a disclaimer, I take no responsibility for any damage caused to your model, computer, career, significant other, or anything else. In the words of the great Tom Henry, "Save often and save revisions".

The first thing you'll need to do is decide where the seam will be in Modeler. In any UV map it's best to hide that spot in case the textures don't line up just right. On a head I like to make it go along the top and back of the head as these areas will usually be covered by hair. Select those points and un-weld them. (Ctrl+U by default). This will look very messy but don't worry it'll be fixed by the end.

The next thing you want to do is select the polygons on one side of the seam and use the stretch tool (h key) to shrink them to 90% away from their original location. You can do this by making sure your Action Center is set to Mouse (Shift + F5) and dragging with the pointer at the opposite end of the polygon row. When finished do the same to the other side and then hit "m" to merge points. Click "OK" and you should have something like this.

Next create a new Morph by clicking the M in the lower right of your screen and choosing New from the dropdown box. Give it a name like "Morph.Unwrap" so it will be easy to find later. With this morph selected select the points around your seam and stretch them out from the center in the front/back viewport. This can be made easier by setting your Action Center to "Selection" (Shift F8). You'll want to stretch them out to about double their distance between the center and the side of the head like so:

With the points still selected go to the View tab and create a new Selection Set called "FIX" and click OK.

Now save your object and we're ready to move on to Layout. Load the object and open it's Properties. This can be done by double-clicking it in the Scene Editor or Selecting it and hitting "P". On the Geometry Tab set it's Subdivision Order to "Last" and the Display Subpatch Level to "0". Next go to the Deform tab and add the Morph Mixer Displacement. You should see it has "1 endomorphs". Double click that and the Morph Mixer panel will open. Click the Arrows in the Morph List on the left side and you'll find the Unwrap morph we created earlier. Click that one and, making sure that your frame slider is still at "0", set it to 100% with the slider.

Now comes the fun part. Close the Morph Mixer panel and go back to the Object Properties. Click the Dynamics tab. Add a Cloth dynamic and double click it to see it's options. On the basic tab set your Fix to the "FIX" pointset we created earlier. Now go over to the Advance tab and set your Polygon Size to 25%. Next set your Frame End point to "150" in the box on the right of the timeline and click the Calculate button in the Object Properties panel. You can watch your object flop about for a few seconds and then on frame 150 it should be settled down to an almost flat object. It may appear as if Lightwave has frozen during this process, but just wait and it should finish, it's just working behind the scenes.

Now with the Frame Slider still on 150 go to File > Save > Save Trans Object and give it a name.

Time to go back to Modeler. Open up your original model if it's not already open and go to an empty layer. Make sure you're on the Base Morph and the Selection Set is set to "None" in the bottom-right then go to File > Load > Load Object Into Layer and select the flattened model you just created. Using the Stretch tool Flatten the object out the rest of the way in the Right/Left Viewport. You can constrain the tool by holding Ctrl or using the middle button on your mouse. Now select the layer with your original object and place the new object in the background. Under the Map tab, near the bottom, you'll find the Bkg to Morph tool. Click that and give it a name if you like, or you can just use the default "BkgMorph". You should now see your original model flatten out exactly like the one in the background.

You can now delete the object that was in the background. Click the T in the lower right and choose "New" to create a new UV map. Set it to Planar, on the Z axis, and click OK. If you set one of your viewports to "UV Texture" you can see how it looks and work on it. As a final step set the Morph back to "base" and go back to your seam. A good way to merge the seam back together is to select the opposite points and choose Weld Average under the detail tab. Now you can do a little tweaking of your UV map if you like and your ready to start painting textures. Have fun!