I think you understood it wrong: i didn't split the vertices - i just split the UVs. The verts are welded together BUT: I programmer told me some time ago, that the model is split by code where different smoothing groups hit together. Means: * 1 smoothing group for whole object: no vert splitting * 1 smoothing group for…
I agree with you there. It's always a case to case judgement. And splitting/hard edges generates more vertices, still the texture will be a lot more "reusable" if there aren't as many huge gradients on the shells in the texture. If you have a few pretty basic shapes in your texture you'll be able to reuse those a lot…
What shep is saying is correct, and again these are two separate issues. Let me see if i can clear this up. A. When you use an averaged cage on a mesh, you will not get any "gaps" or missed detail from the unwelded vertices that result when you use a hard edge on your low. This can appear to be a similar problem to the…