Rounded.Bevel?

LadieStorm · August 2016

Is it possible to make a rounded bevel in cc3+? There are a few things G's I've been wanting to put a rounded bevel on, but I have no clue as to how I go about it. Does anyone know?

Dogtag · August 2016

Have you tried playing with the bevel settings? I just tried tinkering with the values and got the result below, if that helps.

(Click the image for a high-resolution version)

Cheers,
~Dogtag

Loopysue · August 2016

That's ok for nice straight objects, but it gives quite a few problems if you have a jagged line. Its why the cliffs in my Merelan City map look a bit weird - they had these odd little triangles sticking out in the earlier versions. I had to simplify the line quite significantly, to the point where they look more like pancakes than cliffs, just to get rid of the triangles.

Is there any way to do this with a lighted bevel? That seems to cope with jagged lines a lot better, but you can't fade the top of the bevel out at all, and end up with a horrid sharp line at the top of the slope.

I'm in the process of changing MC back to lighted bevel, just so that I can fractalize the cliffs again and make them look more natural, but I'm having to cover the sharp line at the top of the bevel with grass, whether I want to or not.

kmunoz · August 2016

I'd love something like a true rounded bevel, as it would make treetops much more interesting.

Loopysue · August 2016

Lighted bevel is much superior to ordinary bevel, in that it can cope with all kinds of wiggles and kinks in the shape of the area being bevelled, and there are ways to hide the top of the slope or any unwanted peaks and ridges...

You could bevel a tree to a point in the middle, then hide the centre and the unwanted ridges under a smaller splodge of the same texture, but without the bevel, on a Sheet directly above the one with the bevel on it, then fade the edges of the flat sheet to imitate a more rounded bevel, but that would be horrendously time consuming if you had a whole forest of trees! LOL

jslayton · August 2016

The Bevel operation is one of the earliest effects in CC3 and will always run its angles at 45 degree multiples. The assumption (I think) that it would be used on things like web page buttons.

The Bevel, Lighted effect was written with the intent of working on all sorts of angels and shapes. It calculates the distance from the edge (up to a maximum value) and then uses that distance as a slope. It gives much nicer results for the general case of bevels.

The original incarnation of the distance calculation in Bevel, Lighted had some unpleasant horizontal and vertical glitches in its computations, which is why there is the "High Quality" checkbox that uses a much better distance computation algorithm. This better distance computation algorithm does have some issues near the edges of lower-resolution bitmaps that lead to striations and scalloping for high-resolution exports, but you shouldn't run into those unless you are exporting at 5x or 10x the resolution of your bitmaps.

There is a "smoothing" option on the Bevel, Lighted effect that will smooth out some of the less-desirable scallops and other sorts of things caused by the edges of bitmaps.

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Rounded.Bevel?

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