Exporting models from Blender into TDM
edit: TL;DR: I've tweaked the .lwo exporter to preserve autosmooth angle Ahem. When I started writing this post a couple of days ago, it was supposed to be a "please help me, models won't smooth" kind of thing, but as I started taking screenshots and such for a comprehensive view of the problem, the question morphed into a "is there a hack to get .lwo's to export the way .ase's do", then to "how to get the same surface smoothing from Blender as you can get from Lightwave" and eventually to "do
Yes, you're effectively splitting the edges around. Before I tweaked the exporter, checking "smoothed" on export would result in 86° smoothing threshold on the rest of the surface (parts you haven't split). Which is fine for a lot of cases, but in edge cases like with the anvil, thats not enough: you'd want 180°, otherwise there will be unintended sharp edges. It's not just for edge cases though. Before, you had to split the edges manually, otherwise your only choice of autosmooth was 86° or 0°