basic question: glowing parts. better to be a separate mesh or not, if the bake is exploded?

Travis C

so about glowing parts on a mesh. is it better to  separate the mesh of the glowing part, if the normal map is an exploded bake?

what i mean by glowing parts is, say for example the glowing light on a mass effect armor. or the glowy neon bits on a sci fi gun.

so say for instance, in this zoomed in pic of the hipoly mesh, the middle part is supposed to be glowing. also the uv of the middle part is separated. 

Noors

Glowing areas could be defined with a texture (usually called emissive map or glow map). I don't see why you'd need to detach the mesh here or even split the uv's.