Inside substance, there's no reason not to do tri planar if it works for what you're doing. You get seams because you're working with pixels. 😋 Tools like painter can minimize them, but they're still there.
2020 kept me depressed and mostly inactive but im slowly coming back, heres a few things i really liked doing.. gonna keep doing hand painty and pixel stuff
At ~440 pixels, I say you've still got an unnecessarily large header. It's even larger than the one on Polycount, and that has a bunch more information in it. You have three links. That's all.
Focus on the things that really matter, once that screw is placed on a model using something like a 2048x2048 texture, it's going to be less than 100x100px and that tiny pixel thick artifact is going to be blurred to death.
Hmmmm Have you messed with the lightmap resolution? Maybe everything is so low res that only a few pixels are representing those pieces? If you didn't change them, that shouldn't be an issue, though.
Just got the word that the art assets (and excellent pixel editing tools) that come with this are now universal licenses that can be used in any editor/capacity. Or so I heard from someone else.
In 512 it looks softer because of the texture filtering. If you would disable it you would have a fully pixelated 8bit like Normalmap. But because it gets filtered it interpolates and so it looks softer.
I never like choosing. I think both are important. 60fps always makes a game play better. High resolution stops your eyes from getting distracted by ugly pixels.
Awesome. Glad you figured it out. In the future, you may want to ensure a bit more padding between each UV island to prevent pixel bleed over when it accounts for mipmaps.
A lot of it also has to do with your mesh's geometry. If you don't have even sized quads, or you aren't at a high enough subD, things will start to look a little 'pixelated' or stretched.