So in wings3D I set edge hardness to "soft" and in the "smoothed preview" everything looks ok.
But ingame the edges are not smoth. Must I click some buttons in Upspring? (already tried "recalculate normals" but did nothing)

Smoothed is like what happens when you press "s" knorke.

Export settings?

It isn't his export smooth preview shows the model as though you used wings smoothing algorithm on it.

select all the edges you want smoothed then right click hardness-> smooth

yea, I do that. The edge color then changes to show hard/soft.

In wings3d "s" just adds more polygons to the geometry, I do not want that. I want 6, 8 or whatever sided cylinders to appear round ingame.
When repeatedly pressing "s" the model keeps its form instead of shrinking to some undefined blob, so I think the edges hardness are setup correct.

export settings like attached

Knorke, in upspring, select that particular part, and recalculate normals, set it to like 90. Ingame it should appear as a round, smoothed blob.

For that the model's vertex normals need to be interpolated, which you can do by recalculating them in UpSpring with an angular tolerance value larger than (360 / number_of_cylinder_sides) degrees.

NOTE: do not set an excessive value like 90 or the shading between sides and endcaps will be wrong if you are not careful to only select side faces (queue the imfamous banana-boat image).

in 3dsmax they are called smooth groups, in wings all you got is edges you set to non-hard

when you import 3ds files in upspring there will be hard edges where UV seams are... solution: import OBJs

Herp and derp, reason I asked for export options was to see if it was obj; yet when I saw the picture I didn't even think to look for it.

Use OBJ if you want to set your normals in wings, use 3ds only if importing multiple pieces at once is more important (and then use Upspring recalculation tools - but these are often a hammer when you want a screwdriver).

. . . I am not tracing the extra edges as well.

spring stealing vertices: I knew it!

also do post the s3o and wings file for me if you disagree with my assertion.

That did it:

(not all edges got rounded but that might just be the model. At least I now I know how it works)

"Recalculate vertex normals" does nothing (no menu comes up and notice no change on model ingame or in preview)
So I used "recalc. vertex normales, 3D0 style->all objects->45°" which worked.
Fun fact: The Upspring version I used at first, does not have that menu But I remembered having seen that "type in angle number" menu thing, and tada:



so 3ds does not save normals/edge hardness but obj does? For now I will continue to use 3ds though, exporting each piece seperately sounds cumbersome.

It does. but 3ds does bullshit with breaking wields where vertexes share uvcoords. I forget the technical explanation and am annoyed if people expect me to dig it up again so that is the short version.

flaw in 3ds format not .obj or wings fault.

The black lines wings3d draws between faces actually looks pretty nice, can you incorporate somthing similar on the textures?

It is hard to get a consistent level of thickness on all models ivory. That is why the gundam models take 1-2 weeks, I spend a lot of time trying to keep level of detail the same.

Better would be a wireframe overlay or a cell shader.

Yeah, a black wireframe overlay would probably look great

I did some testing with that earlier and actually liked it:

For some faces it might also be nice to have some gradients etc.
But the problem is that it takes too much time and when I started making models I was "just happy that it works in some way."
Now with more experience I know a way how it might be doable but I will not redo all the textures - in many cases it would require uvmapping the model again. To maintain a continuous style I now simply continue with the flat colored faces. So it is basically the result of some bad decisions and starting to make content too early, before being more familiar with the tools.
But on the other hand I want to finish the game and that is only possible by cutting some corners.