Feature Request: Fake Bevel Using Smooth Edges

[BlackBlender]

Currently, the “set smooth” option makes faces totally round, smoothing from one end to the other. This works beautifully on spheres to produce nice results. But it’s inapplicable to cubes where the results are weird.

It would be useful to give “set smooth” an option of “distance from edge”, so the face can look flat till a certain distance from the edge, where it will begin curving to the other face. This will make an illusion of a bevelled object, producing gleaming edges without additional geometry.

Has this been discussed somewhere already?

[LetterRip]

set smooth I think is just a shading/lighting trick, so i don't think what you want is possible.

LetterRip

[joeri]

The smooth is actualy a Gouraud shading.

The computer graphics card interpolates between the normal vectors of the 3 corner verteces of each poly.

[z3r0_d]

autosmooth should be on by default, and should show up in the 3d view

you can bevel your cube if you want beveled edges, there's no way for the renderer to know how big you want the bevels to be [if there at all]

[wavk]

Hey that's funny, I just talked about this thing today with my colleage. He uses Lightwave and was surprised Blender still hasn't got a shader like this. So yes, it is possible. Lightwave has two different implemented shaders to do this. It's a shader and works like a charm!

z3r0_d:

I couldn't agree with you more. I even stopped using auto smooth because of the uglyness you get in the 3d window, it's unworkable. I even prefer segmented renders above having to work with autosmooth!

And also, Lightwave shows good autosmooth in the viewport:)

[BlackBlender]

I found that there is actually a way to do something like it in blender. You can even have real physical bevels without changing your geometry. See here: http://blendertips.blogspot.com/2006/03 ... round.html

[matt_e]

Yeah, but your model is now also 2^6 times more complex, good luck rendering anything more complicated than that cube, and heaven forbid you try to animate it. That's a pretty bad tip if you ask me.

[f22.raptor]

I think its a great idea. I have temporarily stopped using 2.41 due to this and the grid zoom topic i posted in the "interface & tools" forum.

I also think it would be a simple task to make it apply auto-smooth to the 3D window. this would make things more efficient, and prettier!

Also, when you have multiple faced bunched together on a tube or sphereical object - lets say you wanted a pipe with multiple holes around the body, and you want it to be nice and pretty.... well, as it is now blender does this:



This is a suppressor i made. and as you can see, the effect is less than spectacular.... A way to counter this possibly, is making an option for "minimum smooth angle" so angles under a specifiable angle (like 1 or 2 degrees) will act like one solid face. i mean... this isn't just me right? am i the only one suffering this kind of problem?

I do not expect blender to be perfect of course, but i do hope this type (and the above mentioned) are on the "to-do" list of things.

Thanks.