Uving hard edges

ferretleaf

Apologies for two posts in a row... I was wondering if anyone had any advice for UVing the hair here!
 
I heard the rule that all hard edges should be uv seams...however the hair here is stylized and has a lot of bevels so I'm worried that there'll be too many pieces...should i just soften some of the edges or just ignore that rule completely? 

Eric Chadwick

UV splits along hard edges are only needed when baking normal maps from a high-res mesh, and not all the time either.

More about this: http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Normal_Map_Modeling#Smoothing_Groups_.26_Hard_Edges

poopipe

It's the other way round really. 
i.e. where there is a UV split a hard edge can prevent artefacting (it's not compulsory)

Adding hard edge in the middle of a UV shell is completely fine and requires no modification of the UVs