Shading issues in-engine

Millenia

Hey Polycount - I've got a weird-ass shading issue with an asset that I baked and modeled in Max but we're using Maya for pipeline reasons to export it. If the model is imported straight from Max without any alterations the shading looks perfect, but if anything is done to the mesh in Maya (skinning it to a rig in this case), the shading goes absolutely bonkers. We're using OpenCollada 1.41 in Maya 2011. Any ideas?
We've tried unlocking the vertex normals, softening all edges and then hardening UV borders to match my mesh from Max but nothing helps.

EarthQuake

Interesting, the smoothing in the skinned shot looks a little different, but that's maybe just the angle. In any case, that shouldn't be enough to give the sort of errors you're seeing here.

Few Q's
What engine?
What tangent basis?
Do you have any options for normals/tangents/bi-normals in the exporter? If so how are they set?
How about options for mesh compression and/or vertex precession? (we've had some issues with toolbag because of these settings for instance)
Do you have another exporter/file format you can try?
Does this happen only with this mesh, or always with skinned meshes from maya?

Millenia

In-house
Our graphics programmer tells me it uses the exported tangent basis from the mesh so Maya?
No options are available to the artist unfortunately, it'd need code support to tweak the exporter
This neither, unfortunately
Only the OpenCollada based exporter will work with this version of the engine
It happens with any mesh that is edited in any way in maya. Another mesh had modeling operations done for destruction purposes in Maya and it exhibits the same behaviour where as direct obj from max and export to the engine looks perfect. It's baffling :I

The Flying Monk

So, this is related to changing anything in Maya? And not the fact this is a skinned mesh?

I know that if you save an FBX in Maya and then open it it Max the smoothing groups get screwed up. It just seems to bake the smoothing into the vertex normals, except it usually screws up. To fix this in max you need to add an edit normals modifier and reset all the normals. See if there is something like that in Maya.