Gun Animation question

Hi,

I am making a high poly and low poly assault rifle model to sell on turbosquid. So the export would be an obj and textures must fit right in no adjust uv maps etc. I don’t do animations so I don’t know that much about it. I know a bit but no real hands on experience with it.

My question is:
When animating a gun for animation or for a game does the whole gun need to be joined into one model or can I seperate parts and they just be parented to a piece of the gun?

I ask this because the whole rifle would use one texture atlas and therefore have the same average scale. and this causes scaling problems, parts that need to have small detail like the grip which uses a grainy plastic turns in a grip that uses rocky plastic. It would be alot easier to have certain parts use their own uv maps and textures.

If you were buying a model from a site how would you like the model to be organised and layed out?

Thanks

I think jointed as one object makes it easier to use out of the box… but there may be some aspects of that where it might be better to have some parts that can be easily removed (say like a stock that can be changed out or removed) that would be better left as separate objects… I will say this however… if I was looking for a gun model and I was paying next to nothing to get it… you would not hear me complaining about doing a little work on it to get it working right…