Try to texture map something NURBS and you'll immediately understand. Hard surface models in particular are really evil, as you can't use the implicit parametric UV because of all the fillet and trim and other surfaces. A complex model can consist of hundreds of these and some of them are just tiny strips and such. So the…
One possible approach is to use the meshsmooth/turbosmooth option in Max where it keeps hard edges between different smoothing groups. Example workflow: - set up your smoothing groups on the base mesh - add a smooth modifier that separates based on them - add another smooth modifier that doesn't You may have to tweak the…