"I've always been taught" ... by who ? There's a world of difference between best practices and recommendations which can only be generic, and the specifics of a given model developed under (also very specific) circumstances. This is obviously a "one off" model. This is completely different from a model made to be modular…
The thing about the angling of the pieces is that both approaches are perfectly valid and are not mutually exclusive. The lecturer mentioned that it can be best to lay things straight for all kind of valid reasons ; and the artists at ID did things the way they did on this hellknight model also for all kinds of valid…
@dimwalker , @DustyShinigami : "Hard UV shells - do you mean assigning different smoothing groups (in max terms) for each shell? Vertices are already separated there GPU-wise so what's the harm in separating smoothing groups too?" Of course I won't blame you for asking a question, but this kind of "what's the harm" stance…
Hello ! The example with the hands is really as straightforward and self-evident as it can be. If a modeler on a team made the model the way shown on the right, for a bake supposed to capture smooth skin/organics, it simply would have to be redone after removing these hard edges because they are not only unnessary, but…