Can you make too many seams when UV mapping?

Fuiosg

I've heard it said before that you don't want seams in certain places on a mesh, by that I mean the UVs are apart. But I'm not sure if this is old advice from past workflows or if it really is something to be avoided. When I bake out normal maps and so on, everything appears to look fine. Maybe the mipmaps are affected?

Reason I ask is because I'm starting to unwrap some spherical, asymmetrical type shapes which present a problem to clean layouts- and my first inclination is to make a bunch of cuts, rather than just unwrap it as-is with one or two seams.

throttlekitty

It's less of an issue in modern engines, but UV splits increase the vertex count so it's something to be aware of. Use what you need!

musashidan

My rule is a ratio of seams to distortion. If I can't get rid of distortion on an island I'll make a seam cut. And if an island is so long that I'm wasting uv space, I'll cut it. Make the call, the seam/distortion may not even be that noticeable textrured/in-engine. When you're texturing in 3d it doesn't matter so much (aside from vert count increase as mentioned by throttlekitty) as you can paint the seams or triplanar project. Seams did need to be carefully placed/hidden when 2d texturing was king, but not really an issue as much now.