Weirdly the UV unwrap node doesn't seem to unwrap 100% clean, especially with organic meshes.
I often end up with overlapping faces: “UV smooth” and manual smooth brush dont't seem to deal with the problem well, because the smoothing is applied to topologically neighbor points…

How to overcome this problem in a procedural way?
An ideal workflow could be:
1) Procedurally find problematic areas (sort of done in the example file)
2) Fix them (no clue here)

Do you have any advice?

Please have a look at the example file,
or tell me the name of the secret node that already does this

Someone please answer this. I'm losing my mind. In 3DS Max you just type in how much you want it relaxed and it stretches that UV until it's either original proportions or you tell it to stop. UV's in Houdini are almost always weirdly warped even with a flatten and a layout. And in my current case I can't get these UV's to stop overlapping when there's no reason for them to be overlapping in the first place.

if you conform your geometry to its UVs, you can try to append an “attribute blur” node and uncheck “pin border points”.

But maybe there's a better method that works directly on the UVs?

Hi, I'm not sure if this is a solution as I don't use 3DS Max and can't compare results. For something like this you could create seams and use a UV Flatten. You can promote those same seams to points for a UV Smooth constraint if needed.

The main problem is getting the seams in the first place. On a lower poly mesh, manual selection is not much of an issue but on a higher poly mesh, it probably would be.

A UV Autoseam could be a good procedural solution for this but I usually get instant crashes whenever I try to use it. It seems to be working on this hip file so you can have a look to see if it's an option.

hip file attached.