You could make those 6-sided cylinders unwrapped into a 'flower' instead, that takes care of half or so of the seams. Or you could unwrap the sides of it like the side of the large shape. That would also take care of half the seams. Then adjust your smoothing groups accordingly.
This is my basic workflow as well. The thing you really need to keep in mind though, is that while uving you're essentially laying out your hard edges/smoothing groups as well. With experience you'll sort of know where you want hard edges/SG breaks but it takes a little bit of effort to adjust to thinking like this.
Eric when you get to step 6. "Use EdgeSmooth to set the hard edges" Where is EdgeSmooth located? I dont see anything under the Edge Selection tab that would be EdgeSmooth. And adding the Smooth modifier gave me a lot of errors. Also, thanks Nick for pointing out the drop down, this will save me SO much time!
Our process does what your process does with 1 less time consuming step, manually setting smoothing groups. If you create hundreds of objects for a game or even a handful of high triangle count objects our method will save you quite of bit time by removing that step. Again if you have the wherewithal to set your groups…
So what is the case when it comes to an organic model, for example a pelted island, when using Textools it gives the island one smoothing group which obviously causes this error :( I've got this issue on some parts of a model I'm working on at the moment, I've tried to be smart with the unwrap but it can still be seen in…