/3/ - 3DCG

>>634109
1: No it won't, however one of the key ideas of FWN is to prevent the GPU from splitting your mesh into more fragments than needed. A split happens every time you have smoothing groups (split normals), or across UV seams, or across texture seams, or basically any time the engine thinks "uh oh, this needs to be processed as a separate fragment", it will cut that group of polys up, and double up the number of vertices along that line. This allows weighted models to have similar processing overhead as the same mesh with hard edges, despite the seemingly higher initial vertex count.

2: Since your object no longer has any specific mapping, it can't be textured until it's within your game engine. If you intend to show it off within Unreal 4, for instance, what you would do is import the model, create a new material for it, and use UE's own tools and node system to create the texture, using for instance triplanar mapping to lay on the base, and then use the decal system to apply normal maps for additional stuff. For all intents and purposes, your models won't have a texture until they're in the game.

This isn't very convenient in that you're essentially locked into the shading system of a single engine, and you would have to rebuild it if you wanted to transition to Unity or something else, but as long as you have your dev environment on lockdown, it' ends up faster overall, as you can quickly and easily propagate the materials already created within the engine to newly created objects, and never have to touch Painter to make changes. This is why the models of Star Citizen's spaceships have no textures on their Sketchfab page, the textures only exist within the shader they created for CryEngine/Lumberyard, and so you can only ever see them as intended running in-engine.