Thanks, how silly of me to miss that, I have no idea how I didn't see it. You're right, that would absolutey be sufficient!

I can write a MEL script to select each polymesh, auto-unwrap it, add a texture and bake a shadow map to it, save the whole file as myname_lm.mb, then execute a modified version of the splitter with an -lm flag, without building a wmb ilke you mentioned, so that each _lm mdl has the same number prefix and name as the regular mdls. I am confident that I can script that first part in MEL. In that case, a version of the splitter which adds the _lm suffix/doesn't build a wmb would do the trick!

Would you mind adding that to the splitter, if it's not too much work? By the way, a little off-topic but I will mention it here in case you open up and work on the splitter.. could you add another feature? Because each object the splitter exports has a different numerical prefix to avoid conflict, it's difficult to make LOD for so many models.. a solution to this would be a lodgp_ prefix, an LOD group that works like regular groups (gp_) do already, but the level designer makes sure that the contents of each one have a models with the same name and appropriate numericial suffix (0-4) per normal LOD naming convention. Simply put, items in an lodgp_ would be in a normal group but not have that unique numerical prefix.

Thanks for everything, your tools have changed and improved my workflow a million times over