I’ve been reading up about good UV practices, and in several places I’ve read that good seam placement is desirable to make the texturing artist’s job easier so that they don’t have to fix seams. This didn’t feel right to me, since we can easily paint across seams without issue by painting directly on the model. Is this piece of advice stemming from back when software like Substance that allows artists to paint in 3D didn’t exist, and all they had was Photoshop and the UV map? If so, then except for maximizing texture density, how much does good seam placement matter now?
“Texture painting” was a more-recent development …
Just a few days ago there was a support thread here, where the artist struggled with visible seams. This problem is very much alive. In certain conditions.
In that case, I think, they tried to bake to a very small resolution, at an angle, and seams popped up.
Probably, it could have been partially painted over. But it would be “fixing seams” by then.
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Painting over may be a solution, but in fact it is just a way of fixing the seam. The advice is a good one, still.
If you take a uv seam of an otherwise connected meshpart and use one of the prominent unwrapping method out there, quite some algorithms are rather about keeping the faces angles as a constraint than face sizes. UV mapping is just solvable by taking/weighting some constraints as more important than others. You cant optimize over all criterias. And with these algorithms neighboring faces may easily end up at a very different size because of a seam between them. Good seams minimize that, but the problem is there. In a project there might be a concept of reusing textures on different models, what forbids painting them over on one of them, or there might be seamless textures used that repeat over the model, what leads to the same problem, and so on. There are many options in texture mapping that benefit of having clever seams placed. It also helps with rather technical problems like texture fetch alias problems expecially for mipmaps, because of neighboring pixels are also neighboring texels. That are just a few examples, but they are tightly coupled with how things work technically. so in short, yes good seam placement is still important. The tools just got more comfortable over time and in a specific situation a bad seam might not hurt.
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