I don’t know if something similar could be achieved as easily but it would be such an awesome feature.
It’s a new feature in vray 3.3 but it’s available in other render engine too, like Corona. I’m talking about ray traced rounded corners.
Look at 2 mins 45 secs.
Removes the need to add extra geometry. Now, I know Lightmass isn’t a ray tracer but could something similar be achievable?
With the proper technique I’m sure this is possible, In UE4? I’m not sure, but it was certainly possible in Sunset Overdrive. As these slides from this Year’s GDC presentation explain. (PDF)
Some artists do use a rounded edge feature when baking normal maps. Here’s a thread about it on Polycount http://polycount.com/discussion/146280/smooth-edge-shading-legitimate-technique/p1
But I have no idea if there’s a way to do it realtime in engine.
There’s no special tech in the Insomniac presentation, it’s just a modeling/UV workflow.
I’ve done something similar–it’s pretty easy, but slower-than-automatic and can introduce situations where you have to choose between good shading and texture coherency on curved edges.
An automatic, shader based solution would be a cool project for a tech artist. I’d bet Ryan Brucks could probably figure something out, since he’s basically a super-hero.
Hi everyone,
i waiting for this for years, and it can be done , because it exist already on UENGINE … for 3 YEARS!
https://developer.unigine.com/en/docs/latest/editor2/settings/render_settings/ssbevel/
I’ve been waiting for this for years now, and it’s a shame, because as I often work with CAD (which contains thousands of objects), the objects have no chamfer and it would be almost impossible to do them by hand.
That’s why I don’t use unreal completely yet, because the rendering is magnificent, but if I can’t get the bevel shader, I’m forced to stick with blender (octane) or Modo, because they have the functionality.
What you are seeing there is in screen space. I don’t know for sure how Unigine does it, but it is almost certainly sampling the world normal buffer multiple times with offset UV coordinates, which allows it to access data about normal vectors of nearby/adjacent pixels to generate a blended, smoother final normal.
Because these effects operate in screen space, they will have discontinuities and visual artifacts in many situations and aren’t really a substitute for more geometry or properly baked normals.
Tools like geometry scripting can easily add real geometric bevels to meshes automatically and non-destructively.
Here’s an example of that:
I completely agree that there’s a risk of obtaining artifacts with screen space, but I think it’s possible to achieve with the shader, as almost all rendering programs do today.
Round Edges - V-Ray for Maya - Chaos Help.
my problem is that I work mainly with CAD files containing hundreds of objects, often very complex, which makes it almost impossible to create chamfers without artifacts (often, even with the CAD program, I can’t add chamfers to certain parts of the object).
It is not possible unless you can substitute the altered world normals into the gbuffer for the lighting pass which would require modifying the engine.
For some projects, you could do it as a postprocess shader and then do the shading in postprocess as well by taking the dot product of the modified world normals and the light vectors. This wouldn’t require any engine modifications but it has a lot of limitations.
The screen space effect requires sampling the full screen world normal buffer numerous times and is actually a bit expensive as a result (comparable to depth of field).
There are ways to control the chamfer/bevel application in geometry scripting so I really think it is worth investigating further.
Many offline renderers have shader based bevel tools, but they have access to more data about the mesh than a real time renderer so it is not comparable. There’s more detail in this thread, where I also made a somewhat okay looking example of a semi-procedural bevel shader.