Cool

Can you attach the .ma and ini? I would edit them to highres for you if you want.

What did you do to make it that flexible? My ini looks about the same, but it seems less flexible than yours.

Sadly, it's not that easy, as maya is complicated and filemaker needs a proper, non instanciated mesh to work with.

The trick with using normals and still be able to export with filemaker seems to be this:

When you average normals / soften them, the mesh in maya isnt a static mesh anymore, it's calculated by maya at runtime. You can see this in the object list, if your mesh has an "in Mesh" below it.
Filemaker wont convert that mesh anymore, because it isn't really there (maya computes it when you load the file)
Same goes for most other operations (nurbs->poly, softening the mesh itself, subdivisions etc etc)

The only way I found around that is to do this after you applied normals:

- Select modified object, edit->duplicate special->delete the old mesh
- Sometimes filemaker still complains, I found copying the mesh to clipboard and pasting it into a new maya file helps in this case. (Seems to be a maya bug?)

I bet there is a better workflow for this, but so far this has worked for me. (Se my anal beads, they are done this way)

Try Edit->Delete History->All and File->Optimize Scene Size. This should remove all non static crap.
Again i can't try it myself because i don't have v3 yet....