Several reasons: I don't think in terms of hard/soft edges, I think in terms of surfaces - continuous smooth surfaces and surfaces that are separated by an angle break. For me, at least, this make more sense and is more intuitive than hard/soft edges. Smoothing groups are way easier to work with. I can select by SG and I…
Which is fine unless you want hard edges in different places from the uv borders. I like smoothing groups because they're stored explicitly and you can select by them.
Try putting a Poly select mod on first and then the Edit poly mod>collapse the stack. It's ridiculous smoohing between Maya/Max still hasn't been fixed considering they are both Adesk flagship products with a 'send to.....' button feature between the 2. I often get .fbx files from Maya and the normals are completely…
Thanks for your input guys, I will explore these options. @musashidan Yeah thanks, I am familiar with the hard/soft edges option in Max, but for my purposes Max smoothing groups are preferable. @Swordslayer The models are created in Maya by an outsourced artist and saved into .max format on their end before submission.…