Real world objects have some amount of radius or bevel on the edges (unless you are modeling knife blade edges).

Micro bevels on rendered objects catch the light and make the render more photo-realistic.

Some programs exist to give renders a fake bevel function:

www.happy-digital.com/edgefx.asp

http://wiki.mcneel.com/labs/edgesoftening

My understanding is this technique modifies the surface normals around the object's hard edges to give them a beveled look.

Would it make sense to build this into MoI? That is, an option to specify a fake bevel per edge, so that OBJ exports with modified normals on the specified edge(s)?

Adding small bevel or fillet geometry is time consuming for complex models. It also makes it harder to modify the model later.

Not all render programs have this function. So, is doing this on the model app rather than the render app a possibility?

Ed