It's a VERY often to happen kind of thing...

Almost everyone who starts into organic forms in Polygons has to face it. And definately everyone who tries out low poly models.

You have to learn to use the vertex edit normals tool for really impressive results Another method is to select by faces and set the angle to be somewhere around 30 and 90 degrees for the soften/harden options. But to automate it in short time I use one of two techniques.
[list=1][*]If you don't already have your UV map prepared or want to do changes on it anyways, just select the mesh then export and reimport it as a DXF. What this does is it unifies the surface continuity. This IS the fastest solution. But in return zero's the UV coordinate system. So for short the disadvantage is that DXF doesn't store any texture Data[*]You could slect the object. go to modify/Convert/Polys to SubD's (in the options box you can choose to keep the original or to delete the original) and then reconvert it back to polygons but selecting the tessellation method to vertices and keeping the level to 0. You should have just about the same effect that the exporting as a DXF would be giving and you would also still have the UV coordnates still.[/list=1]

Now the stuff to watch out is. That converting to a SubD and back does tend to create blind nodes so you may want to delete histories and also optimise the scene often as you go.

A trick to 'not do' is that not always can you just export the object as a DXF and then transfer the UV coordinates from the original when you import it back. Cause DXF carries almost no data other than the point cloud coordinates.. and starts to number the vertices to it's own will.

As I guess you have a map already, so you may want to convert it to a subD and back. But you may also want to do a little creasing (Full/partial) on som of the edges so the SubD doesn't totally try rounding it all up. Thats the advantage of converting to SubD's first. You can REALLY control the surface normals for converting it back to polygons. And infact you can increase the poly count if you want by just converting it back in a higher level selection.


Let me know how it goes if you try it out.