Hmm, hard. You'd need to lay out each face with the surrounding edges touching, then make a + shaped selection and blur from there. Maybe extending out the corner /edge pixels. How much blur ? Blah, pictures worth a thousand words - this is how I'd do it :
Er, if this is what you're talking about, then look at the drop-down menu under the Opacity Jitter bar, and select "Pen Pressure" instead of "None". (For PS7 and above) I thought everyone knew that though? This should have been in the 2d/3d Discussion forum, btw
Before exporting out of Max, did you make sure to 'clean' it? Like select all the vertices and weld at a small threshold or reset XForm, etc? Also, check you settings in UDK, make your sure you have NormalMap or NormalMap_Uncompressed in the settings for compression.
a little tip.. when i use it i only do chunks of verts at a time. so go into your edit poly and make a vert selection and then run the script on those verts only. this work much better than trying to do the whole mesh at once.
Code - there's a little arrow on the right side of the layer bar. If you alt-click that, it adds your selection to that layer. AFAIK, it doesn't display the objects on a layer, though. You can always use the normal max layer manager for that, or use the outliner, since it's a bit cleaner.
Make sure you're rendering with Mental Ray. Now in the Render to Texture dialog you can add different kind of maps(diffuse,shadow,specular,normalsmap etc), if you have MR as your renderer you should be able to select Ambient Occlusion(MR).
I am /way/ too trigger-happy with iPhone apps and games. Just grabbed it, and it's pretty neat. Love the overall aesthetic, especially with the menu art/level select, etc. How long did you guys work on this? ps. Love the help screen :D
Try disabling the option to load history when opening projects. Only save history when it is something you need. Try selecting a subtool and click the make poly mesh 3d button to make a clean clone with no history. Try exporting that as both a tool and obj.
It looks like he did. But his version is probably more in tune with what he needs for his autorig. Where as Maya's tool has a bunch of options you need to select to get the desired affects. Probably a little less what he needs, as well.
I would start by modeling a very basic hand and maybe smoothing it, then by using an assortment of the techniques shown here http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?siteID=123112&id=9014331 but I imagine the "Create Shape From Selection" button will get the most use.