Hi Nick, well that's too bad - it would be possible for that to be avoided if the Alibre .bip export would output vertex normals to the .bip file that they generate. It's kind of surprising that they don't do that, since you get a much higher quality smooth looking shading when that is done. Not just for sphere seams but it would improve shading and reflections in quite a lot of other areas as well.

You might want to look at SimLab Composer:
http://www.simlab-soft.com/3d-products/simlab-composer-main.aspx

I believe that SimLab uses the same KeyShot render engine, but it can import OBJ files, and I think it can even generate .bip files as well. It's not too expensive - $149 for the rendering edition, and it sounds like the less expensive $99 PDF generation version may still have the export to .bip that might work better for you (you could go export from MoI to OBJ, then OBJ to .bip using SimLab and then .bip into KeyShot, maybe with vertex normals intact all the way hopefully). I think they have a trial version that you could test with.

- Michael