Indigo Renderer Forum

does Maya have an equivalent of blender's edge split modifier?

see my other thread about render settings for an example pic of cylinders I exported from Maya which exhibit normal smoothing errors (at their bases).

your thoughts please.

With obj export, normals infos are preserved so you need not such tool.
You can of course code a mel script to emulate blender's function That script would be something similar to:

1) Normals > Set Normal Angle, keep the focus on the edge selection mask afterwards and:

2) Select (on the left of the Polygon menu as of 8.5) > Select Using Constraints:
Constrain: Next Selection
Properties: Smoothing: Hard
Leave the others as is. Note that the selection constrain will remain active until you set it to Nothing or hit Close and Reset button. Oh by the way drag a selection box all around the oject and only hard edges should be selected; as usual check the backface culling before or do the selection in two steps.

3)splitEdge 2.0.0. Explore this one by yourslef cause I never used it. I hope the offset is on the picture for demonstration purpose or you'll have to merge by distance afterwards.

4) Mesh > Separate, and you are set !