Do UV seams matter as much nowadays?
I'm experimenting with a blender plugin called Zen UV (a very advanced UV unwrapping plugin) And I got to say it does a very good job at unwrapping your UVs for you without having to put in that much work. Of course course if I put in some manual work I could sew some islands together and make it have less seams. But is there much point in doing that now with apps like substance painter existing? The only reason I can think that having very strategically placed seams is for texture animations via offsets and such but maybe that's done differently. But other than that, seams don't seem to bother me much when texturing via substance painter. Just means you will have less edges to clean which isn't all that hard and regardless you will probably be going over edges without seams anyways so that your texture doesn't look like slapped on smart material.
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I think you have the right idea.
Use hte method that gets work done fast. THen if you run into a specific problem related to placement of seams, you can edit them as necessary. Otherwise dont waste any brain energy over it.
Just make sure you are saving and filing your work in a way that you can return to any stage of the process in case you suddenly discover that you need to go back and make some edits. Can't predict everything.
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:
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:
you could instead:
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.
UV Mapping addons are great. And can do a decent job. Especially compared to somebody who is new to UV mapping. But this just works to a degree. Addons knows nothing about topology, and how to hide seams to make them as few visible as possible. And every unnecessary UV patch usually also reduces the texel density. Since you need to add some padding to it to avoid pixel bleeding from neighbour regions. And with mip mapping it is still an issue to have as few UV patches as possible. Since here you might see the seams at one point, when it goes down one or two mip mapping steps.
As told from my previous posters, it is not black and white though. The result from an addon can be pretty much also be used as a starting point. Or might just require minor tweaks. Or even might work without further modifications. I would just not trust the result blindly.