http://polygonspixelsandpaint.tumblr.com/post/19733351349
So, in short, I followed the advice offered by this post that I arrange all of my uv’s very very strictly so that the UV Shell Borders are straight lines.
The article goes so far as to say it’s THE ONLY way to avoid UV Seams. So, at a significant cost to myself in terms of time, while texturing arms, I went as far as to break apart all of the fingers into separate islands so that everything could be kept as a neat little box.
From what I can see, all that did was increase my island count and consequently increased the amount of likely places to have visible seam glitches while wasting a lot of my time doing this labor intensive method of creating things and then later having to undo the damage of this advice.
Am I missing something? Is this good advice?
Slight aside: A pet peeve of mine that I have gained while learning how to make normal and displacement maps is that people demonstrate their techniques on really simple things like a rock or a cube without an appreciation of the fact that the techniques they are showing don’t really scale up to more complex things like hands or faces.