CompuServe Messages

How about edge "painting" with smoothing groups in an interactive window? Currently, I use the "View " PXP and select faces individually and then flip back and forth to get the effect I want, but it's pretty clumsy and doesn't work all that well. I think 3DS5 would really benefit from a new "edge" object category. For instance, for smoothing, I want o smooth the border between adjoining faces, and not necessarily the faces themselves. Also, for complicated objects (my specialty is characters) I pretty much have to do the smoothing on a face by face level, selecting individual faces along a common border-very laborious. If this process could either be automated or made interactive, I would be grateful. Also, a question about smoothing: Every once in a while I come across some faces that won't smooth no matter what: I can set the smoothing angle in automatic smoothing from 0 to 360, even -1000 to 1000, detach the offending faces as an object and assign the entire object to any given group, do the same with selected faces, and I always get the same result, hard edges between the faces. What am I doing wrong here?