@se24vad -
https://coolcodea.wordpress.com/2013/12/13/139-importing-full-3d-models-into-codea/
@se24vad I have quite a few fairly complex models flying around, and if you keep the lighting calculations in the vertex shader it stays pretty smooth on an Air, not tested yet on older hardware.
I’m obviously still fairly new to 3D (and you probably know this), but you can calculate a face normal, and then apply it to all three vertex normals. @Ignatz has a function for this in the code he linked to above. The idea (I’m hoping) of using Blender vertex normals is that you can choose which parts of the object are being drawn with, effectively, face normals (ie hard edges), and which with vertex normals (edges are occluded, to an extent)
@yojimbo2000 - there is quite a nice trick for making low poly rounded surfaces seem perfectly smooth. Get the shader to use normal = vertex position - centre, where centre is the centre of the circle forming the rounded surface.
Of course, the edge of your object won’t be rounded, just the interior.