Well, I guess I kinda forgot to announce this here… 
So, 2.69 will have split normals export for both FBX and OBJ formats. I just fixed a (stupid, as always) bug in core code last week, think everything works OK now. You can still test latest Blender builds, obviously! 🙂
Also, as I’m now hired for six months on mid-time base by the Blender Foundation, especially to work over game-dev tools, I have chosen loop normals (i.e. split normals, i.e. normals per vertex per face) as main project, so expect more new features on this topic in upcoming releases. I’ll also try to keep this blog updated about it, this time!
mont29 
All this vertex normal things are missed by many gamedev folks. It breaks standard gameart pipeline and this can be reason why studios don’t choose blender. Are you gonna implement manual editing of vertex normals?
How much money will cost implementing Smooth Groups / Face groups like 3dsmax and modo have? I’m asking seriously.
Oh come on, smooth/face groups are a mess compared to nice Blender’s sharp edges!
And I thought I had understood split normals were precisely a big lack of Blender for gamedev currently? So yes, I’ll keep working on those, it’s just a bit tricky to add them nicely into current data model and code…
I agree that smooth groups are weird, personally I prefer hard and soft edges. But point is that many people need them for export/import stuff. Modo have both and people can work as they like.
Also face groups working like vertex groups will be usefull. Converting vertex selection to faces can cause wrong results, eg on checker like selections.
Thanks for your work! 🙂
So how do I go about setting and exporting hard edges with FBX?
That’s already in trunk, so in 2.69 you just export your model with normals (default), and you get sharp edges!
I don’t understand – now I can make sharp edges without Edge Split? Does this work only when exporting or it possible to see result in Blender’s edit window and rendered images?
Yes, sharp edges may be exported correctly without having to splitting them.
Currently, this is not available in viewport nor in render (the first is being worked on and will hopefully be in 2.70, the later it has not yet been decided if/how this will work)…