You don't need to separate your islands that much. Keep it to around 90* or greater**. Search around for UV border scripts that will harden the edges along island borders. This ensures that smoothing groups are applied to each chunk as they are needed. **As a general rule of thumb. This can change depending on target…
Yeah, but no matter how much I increase padding in max, there's still the same colored pixels extended from the border. Maya adds another line of pixels inside the UV shell, of a different color. It's like a gradient on top of the border that gives me the perfect smooth edge - even with 1px padding in Maya it looks good.…
@cryrid: Didn't work, it's already on 180 and crease by polygroups has the same result. In R6 it works fine with the same model :/ Thanks anyway. EDIT: Actually it does work, but not on borders; "crease all" tags all the edges, including the borders, but when subdividing it only has effect on edges that share 2 or more…
Instead of merge UVs, use sew UVs or Move and Sew UVs (with an edge selected Shift+RMB in the UV Editor). Its also very important, that you display texture borders (Borders of UV shells) in the viewport and UV Editor. This way you can see if your UVs are connected, or just sitting side by side.