Welding and smoothing everything

Sorry if this has been asked before. I did search already. I’m wondering if someone can help me.

I’m importing extremely large world objects with many components using OBJ format. I can export them again fine, except all vertices are unwelded and all faces are unsmoothed. That’s my only problem.

In Blender, I can only select each individual “mesh” (the “world objects” have many, one for each different material) and perform weld and smooth for each one individually. This is a long and difficult process for such complicated objects.

Is there any way I can weld and smooth everything automatically?

Or does anyone have any other advice on mass welding and smoothing in this program?

Thank you.

(oops, I totally messed up the thread name and now I can’t seem to change it. It should be called “Welding and smoothing everything”)

You could join all your objects together into one mesh, remove doubles (W / remove doubles), recalculate the face normals (Ctrl+N), apply smooth shading, then separate them out again if you need to (select all vertices and P / separate loose parts)

Thanks Richard, that is SO close to what I want to do! But now all the model group names and the material names have been destroyed. It’s really important they stay intact so when I export it again it knows what material to use. So doing it this way is even more of a headache than welding and smoothing each of them individually, just because the names get lost.