Micro Bevels on MoI Objects

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 From:  ed (EDDYF)
3665.1 
Real world objects have some amount of radius or bevel on the edges (unless you are modeling knife blade edges).

Micro bevels on rendered objects catch the light and make the render more photo-realistic.

Some programs exist to give renders a fake bevel function:

www.happy-digital.com/edgefx.asp

http://wiki.mcneel.com/labs/edgesoftening

My understanding is this technique modifies the surface normals around the object's hard edges to give them a beveled look.

Would it make sense to build this into MoI? That is, an option to specify a fake bevel per edge, so that OBJ exports with modified normals on the specified edge(s)?

Adding small bevel or fillet geometry is time consuming for complex models. It also makes it harder to modify the model later.

Not all render programs have this function. So, is doing this on the model app rather than the render app a possibility?

Ed
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 From:  Michael Gibson
3665.2 In reply to 3665.1 
Hi Ed, are you talking about something that applies only to the polygon mesh data, not anything to do with the actual NURBS model itself?

Yeah, ideally stuff like that would happen at render time, for example similar to how applying a displacement map modifies the altitude of the mesh geometry when it is rendered.

That kind of polygon-mesh focused processing is just not really what MoI is focused on - I mean it does focus on creating a mesh from NURBS surfaces, but there are a whole lot of different kinds of polygon mesh editing functions that are generally outside of the realm of what MoI is focused on handling itself...

Generally the focus is - if you want to do different kinds of editing of the polygon mesh data after it has been generated, you would use a polygon mesh editing program to do that, not MoI.

I'd be kind of worried about trying to build in some variety of mesh editing tools directly into the export step, because it could possibly turn the export process into some kind of complex process with a lot of various stages and options in it... Anyway that's what I would be concerned about with opening up this kind of feature avenue.

The other issue is that it's actually pretty complicated to do a good job of that - it's not just only a modification of the normals all by themselves, the surrounding polygons need to be kind of trimmed back and a little new polygon inserted in there. Just tweaking only the normals alone of something like a large polygon face of a box would have an effect that would spread things across the whole large face, in order to localize it a small polygon has to be put in there. It's pretty easy for there to be difficulties if the polygons around the edge are already of a small size, because that could mean that you would have to alter the mesh more substantially by pruning out several little polygons until finding one to cut back, I think that the Rhino labs one you linked to can run into difficulties due to this problem.


- Michael
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 From:  Michael Gibson
3665.3 In reply to 3665.1 
Hi Ed, so also notice that neither of those plug-ins that you linked to actually change the export process of those programs, they don't modify the OBJ export process for example...

Trying to do something like that at export time only is kind of an awkward fit.

- Michael
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 From:  ed (EDDYF)
3665.4 
Thanks for the explanation. I thought the fake bevels were done strictly by manipulating the normals at the edge.

Ed
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 From:  WillBellJr
3665.5 
I have a plugin for Cinema4D that does that mod to the normals.

It doesn't modify the imported geometry at all. It's a render-time effect.

The idea of course was to save time and memory by NOT add fillets and chamfers to the model and letting the plugin smooth stuff out...

Depends on what you're trying to achieve - prob is, if you don't have similar for your other render apps, you're better off just modeling in the fillets.

-Will
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