Safe Bevel

This tool try its best to bevel a mesh without overlapping.

Blender's own bevel has an option "clamp overlapping", but it stop all edges bevel once it encounter any overlapping face. It does not solve the problem.

This tool do the bevel with individual clamp for each edge. It try to avoid the overlapping and allow you to continue the bevel with large offset value.

It is the advanced version of my experimental addon "slow bevel" with 100% new method and new code. This tool is designed for adding tiny bevel for rendering.

Testing (Level of cut = 1, Bevel shader)

Bevel Testing

Updates

version 1.2.0

- Improved speed and stability for n-gons (without triangulation)

Version 1.1.0

- Enhanced stability for n-gons mesh (without triangulation)

- Improved triangles handling

- A lot of bug fixes.

Enjoy !

Usage

Edit mode > Right Click > context menu > Bottom of context menu, select "Safe Bevel"

Technical Design

- This tool does not use blender's built in bevel API. It is 100% independent code and do all the geometry calculations by itself.

- Due to python limitation, the speed is slow. I want to write a C++ version, but cross-platform support will be a problem.

- I have another version that can do the high number of cuts easily, without recursion. However, that version is too slow, so fallback to recursion method.

Limitation

Here are the known limitation of the tool :

- The tool bevel all edges of the object.

- Bad topology may cause problem (many diagonal edges or sharp angle edges). Future updates may improve it, but still working on it.

- The speed is slow for Cut Bevel > 1.

Options

- Bevel amount : the width of bevel

- Bevel edge margin : this is the minimum distance between two meeting edges

- Bevel Cuts : this is the recursive level of bevel. The tool repeat the bevel with this value, so when it is 3, it has 8 edges (2 x 2 x 2). Please avoid using a high value

- Divide Concave : this option split the concave ngons face before the bevel. It is useful because concave always cause topology problem for bevel.

- Divide Non-Planar : sometimes the faces is not flat and has strange positions. This option split the face into triangles.

The Story

When I created Grid Modeler (my another addon), I always want to render the models with tiny beveled edges. It is shinny on metal surface and looks cool. However, the blender's bevel modifier does bad job. My models are n-gons so it is hard to sub-divide them. Therefore I want a bevel tool that works better to tiny details and handle overlapping well.

This tool is still highly experimental. If you are interested, please buy it to support my continuous research. Thanks!