Your main problem is you think this takes a significant amount more of time to do. The extra lowpoly modeling should be extremely fast to do, and it saves massive amounts of time dealing with bake setup etc(especially doing test bakes, revisions, etc it really adds up). In reality it SAVES time. Practice your modeling a…
Wow I had no idea... since I started modeling a few months ago, I've been trying to make sure that everything was fully connected. Now with this knowledge, I can save some polys! Thanks guys!
A UV seam doesn't matter. What matters is a hard edged seam from having two intersecting meshes. With a "merged" model you will never get that, with intersecting models you will always get aliasing. What Fletch is saying is entirely correct. Just look at his example. The less hard intersections the more seamless and…
I'm not saying the result of a merged mesh wont look superior if you take the extra time to work on it, I just don't see it saving any UV space if the UVs need to be split anyway, nor do I see the connection point looking so unacceptable.
In the split version there is a circular area in your uv tile which is dead space. In the merged version there is a circular hole which you can put other uv islands into It may seem like a small saving but it adds up the only way to use the space in an overlapping mesh is to do 2 bakes and merge them after the fact.
:/ Is this really necessary? Anyways, these things are so context and situation based, I feel like sometimes it does save you some time to not make every surface contiguous, and other times it's necessary. I kinda agree with cryrid, it's not the worst thing ever, but you don't want it up in your face with something like…
Its a perfectly legitimate point to make. If a large concern to an artist is speed when doing the lowpoly modeling using many intersections vs merging bits together then that artist's workflow is something that needs to be looked at. I've explained the various other benefits and how modeling merged meshes can really save…