Theres quite a few "pelting" tools available for maya, have a look on highend 3d in the downloads section for maya.

They do a decent job of unwraping the UV's but generally you would probably want to have a bit more control over where the UV's are been placed so some menual adjustment is usualy needed, as far as I know theres no "magic Bullet" for it, its just trial and error to get whet you need.

As you probably know the UV's shouyld all be in scale where you need it, i.e try to keep the legs the same scale in the UV editor as it would be in the viewport.