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You mention you could stitch some uv's here and there - but that sounds like you aren't aware of the fact that it'll affect your shading, which of course goes on to effect your bakes and normal maps, lods etc. etc. Yes, you could run a uv -> hard edge script, but that means there could be some UVs that you stitched together which have really harsh angle deviations that are now being softened, creating a huge shading gradient.

Before even UVing, you should be considering a couple of things:

• how your mesh shades from your placement of hard and soft edges
• how much more vertices you are adding by having splits from hard edges

Yes - using things like 3d painting means seams aren't so much of an issue as they were back in the photoshop texturing days - but they still have to be considered. The more splits you have, the more hard edges, the more vertices your mesh would be. The less splits you have, the more soft edges you'll see which comes along with harsh shading if not controlled with more geometry.

Two routes:

• hard edge split -> requiring a uv edge split -> more verts. Benefit here is that shading is tight and predictable, downside is you'll have some unavoidable seams if your mesh is seen upclose, the required uv split from the hard edge will also cost you vertices.

you could instead:

• chamfer the original hard edge in order to keep the edge soft, not requiring a uv seam here. Benefit here is that your uv is contiguous and wouldn't have any splitting seams. The downside is that shading is harder to control and may not be as tight/flat as just simply creating a hard edge (Vertice amount would be the same scenario).

The net amount of vertices would be the same in either scenario - both have their scenarios that work best.

For character work I would actually say that they matter more than ever - because now that model density can capture all kinds of details, one absolutely wants seams to follow ... well, actual seams. And brushing them off as "doable in substance painter" would litterally mean adding more time on top of an already extremely lengthy workflow.

If anything, they also allow ID maps to become more clean now because ID regions can pretty much follow polygons (and be split off accordingly) as opposed to crossing over in awkward places.

I guess at the end of the day it really depends on how clean the asset really needs to be. ZenUV is looking really useful BTW, time to try it out.

That inside corner will need additional support loops to remain sharp. The width of these loops should be similar to the width of the other perimeter support loops. There's a few different ways to approach the topology layout. As long as everything smooth properly, it's possible to use triangles and n-gons to connect the corner support edges to the rest of the geometry. Since this mesh will be used as a base mesh for sculpting it probably makes sense to try and keep everything on a quad grid.

Here's a couple examples of all quad topology layouts that provide additional support for the inside corner. The first example uses a bit more geometry and since the peak of the cut out lands between the segments the topology is compatible with back to front mirror modifier.

The second example uses a bit less geometry but, since there's a quad connecting the edges around the peak, it won't work with a back to front mirror modifier. Both of these topology topology layouts would probably have to be created before sculpting on the base mesh.