Geometry Question for PAs

Inkubo

Suppose I'm making a table for inclusion in a product. It has a top, four legs, and a shelf, and it will not have subsurf applied in DAZ Studio. What's the "right" way to model it?

1. Should I make sure all parts are manifold and welded, so the entire model consists of linked faces--one piece?
2. Is it okay to model the parts separately so that they aren't welded, and delete certain faces you never see, such as the top where the legs meet the table, to avoid including and having to reinforce unnecessary faces in the model?

I'm working on such a table now, and I took the first path, with manifold and welded faces--but it means adding a lot more faces, some unnatural bevels, and making the model very difficult to unwrap in Blender. And the difficult unwrap means the UV textures aren't nice and clean and easy for a buyer to modify in GIMP or Photoshop.

I'd like to ditch the whole thing and start over with a cleaner table made of as few faces as possible, but I don't know if unwelded/nonmanifold geometry will be a problem when I submit the product to DAZ.

nicstt

Use as little geometry as needed to model what you need.

Making sure everything is linked takes more time, uses more geometry and causes issues (or can) with upwrapping.

Whilst placing separate pieces together can look wrong, it can also look right; after all, the real world is not moulded from one piece.

Inkubo

So let's say I model a table leg like a drinking straw, with one set of faces that wraps around to form a cylinder but no encaps on the top and bottom you'd never see anyway. Will DAZ QA's reaction be "Wow! No wasted faces, and look at this great memory performance!" or "Sorry, we have to reject this submission because of all the non-manifold geometry?"

IAs long as the subsurf modifier doesn't get used, is non-manifold geometry perfectly okay for use in DS, with both the 3DL and Iray engines?