Hi BlackBird - the Edgesplit modifier doesn't fully solve the problem, although it does generally help with polygon-based vertex normals generation if all the polygons are roughly the same size and if you don't have things like one big planar polygon next to a small sized one like you often do with CAD models. So another thing that helps reduce the artifacts somewhat is if you dice the output from MoI up into more evenly sized pieces using the "Divide larger than" option at export time from MoI.

But these all only generally reduce the shading artifacts that you will get to be smaller, they will still be there and usually still be very noticeable if your model is brightly lit like in a studio product shot or something like that, especially if there are any shiny reflective surfaces involved.

So it does depend a little bit on what particular kind of renderings you're doing - if you're doing stuff that is kind of darker, highly textured to be sort of dirty looking already, then yeah it's possible that these Blender problems might not be such of an issue. With that style of rendering it will be difficult to see the shading glitches. But a lot of times people using CAD want more of that kind of brightly lit studio type shot and these vertex normal problems in Blender are terrible for those kinds of shots.

As far as I know, Blender is the only rendering program out there that just totally ignores vertex normals that are in OBJ files, every other rendering system that I know of is able to load and use them if they are in the file... So if you want a render that has crisp and accurate looking shading it is better to use a different renderer.

- Michael