UV islands are split along SG outlines

[Findus]

My goal is to select UV islands in the UV Preview window with one click. Generally that works well.

However if a UV island is composed of faces with different Smoothing Groups (imported) each of these SGs is treated as its own island.

(Now I guess that makes some sense, since different smoothing groups are probably treated as split vertices internally and it might be even desirable in some instances, but generally UV and SG breaks should be treated as separate properties.)

Is there a way to select complete UV islands ignoring Smoothing Group breaks or keep 3d coat from splitting imported UVs along Smoothing Group seams? (In the UV Preview that is, on the mesh the edges are not shown as UV seams.) Is there a selection tool that will select whole elements or UV islands? ( I tried the "mark seams" trick with clicking in the middle of a polygon, but that only selects the island until the next SG break.)

(I tried the weld vertices option on import, but that didn't change anything.)

Here are my export (3ds max) and import settings:

 

 

Edited August 9, 2017 by Findus