How to deal with seams in the middle of a sword

Borx25

When I have a blade for a sword i usually try to not split the uvs in the middle to avoid seams, for one handed swords and such making the texture rectangular instead of square fits just fine without needing to split it, but i'm making a rapier now and the blade is long and thin so either i make 8192x512 or something like that or i'm not going to get a decent resolution for it without splitting, right?
Is such a thin and long texture a good thing or somthing i should avoid?

So i should split in two or three parts, but how should i do it to avoid normal map seams? uv split but not hard edge right, so the whole side of the blade is on the same smoothing group as I belive the rule was if you have a hard edge you need a uv split but not the other way around, confirmation would be nice.

In previous attemps i've got a normal seam, that's why im asking, basically, so i guess i'm doing something wrong.

What leads me to the whole synced tangent basis or space thing which i don't know much about and i'm not sure which one should i use for skyrim, i bake in xnormal, but i could get handplane and change it to the one that fits better skyrim if i knew which one...
Or if i'm stuck with non-synced normals any tips to minimize the seam would be nice too.

Thanks in advance for any help on the matter.

battlecow

I'd make a 4096/2048 or 2048x1024 texture map.You may have to scale the uvs to fit on 1 UV space for them to work in engine or with xnormal, but that's hardly a problem, just resize the map in photoshop.


edit: That's what I did when modding for skyrim with decent results.
Unless I have a sharp angle I leave soft edges for skyrim, gets the best looking seams in my opinion.