The Maya 2016 has really raised the bar for new features across the many tools and workflows that Maya offers.
an in depth review of the many UV Editing improvement that were added to Maya 2016
If you haven’t had the chance to check out what is new in Maya 2016, you can check out the walkthrough I did of the lesser-touted features here.
Here, Autodesk’s Steven Roselle walks through the features added into the Maya 2016 UV environment.
There are quite a few big changes in the Maya UV environment, but there are also smaller, more subtle changes as well.
An example of a really great change that might get overlooked, is that the UV environment now works more like the 3D view in Maya. You can use a lot of the same selection techniques in the Maya 2016 UV editor, in the way you create the selection of paths.
Maya 2016 UV improvements also bring new brush-base UV tools that will make you UV life much, much easier. Some of the UV tools can even be used in the 3D environment to affect the 2D UV’s — something that was impossible in previous versions.
Steven also covers other lower level updates, such as the new UV creation tools with a look at Contour Stretch.