smoth corners - round edges on materials

[PaleoNeo]

@Andrei Branescu;440699

I was looking for the same thing. I think the easiest way is to bevel the corners in the high poly mesh and bake that into the normal map.

For me, this was important because I am doing some low poly furniture assets and I don’t want to have to do the high poly version just for round corners. A way around this is to add a bevel modifier and bake the normal from that. This way you “generate” a high poly mesh but in it you also have the low poly mesh. If you want to obtain the low poly, you just remove the modifiers.

I feel that this is much needed to speed up production of secondary objects like chairs or tables. Sometimes you don’t have the time to bake from high poly and a simple material that defines only the amount of smoothness would be a god-send to remove those low poly hard edges . I lack the knowledge to write it but it seems quite similar to a normal mapped material performance-wise.

From the Vray documentation

Enable Round Edges - enables the round edges effect which uses bump mapping to smooth out the edges of the geometry during render time.
Radius - specify a radius (in world units) for the round edges effect. Since the actual geometry is not being changed and only the normals of the faces are affected large values here may produce undesirable effects.

I’m playing around inside the material editor to see what I can do with a curvature map. I really hope that the dev team realizes how many guys coming from the arch industry and indie community may find this helpful!