Method for adding geometry without losing work on UV map?

[SnowFella]

Welding is a go in most cases though if you first drag the vert you want to move to it's intended target, or use the scale spinner to minimise the distance between the verts (keep Edge constraints turned on when you do this), then just select the 2 verts that now share worldspace and weld them.

[virtualalias]

Thank you, Snowfella. Would you say that the texture map wasn't properly organized/welded in any place that might significantly improve my next iterations and or work?

[germball]

Originally Posted by Cryrid

Which program are you using?
I know in XSI there are a few ways to do it, and I assume the same goes to other programs. Usually I just select a face, extract it, do whatever needs to be modeled/unwrapped on the new mesh, and then merge it back with the original mesh (and hit the merge UV button).

yep, this a really stong feature in XSI and something many people overlook. They call it 'non-destructive workflow'. You can really butcher the geometry and it will not break your UVs, even on a skinned envelope, which is impressive, because often deleting or adding just one vert will screw up the skinning.

There's also a feature called Texture Swim, which is alot like the preserveUV in Max. Does basically the same thing, execept you can delete/add verts and it won't break anything. Its a very good little feature, but when you freeze the construction history/stack, you lose it and can't go back to it, which is a shame.