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Old 01-03-2008
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tom120934 tom120934 is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: France
Age: 28
Posts: 2,715
There is several ways to achieve that. Like you should already have seen, the current beveling feature is useless. The script is better, but I don't use it either.

What I do is creating the mesh first without extra work on sharp edges and in a second time, I add extra vertices along the edges with Ctrl+RKEY. And this feature allow you to control precisely where the extra vertices are added, but it's a bit unobvious :
- When you hit Ctrl+RKEY, Blender allow you to select where to place the extra vertices row.
- Move the cursor to change the location then click LMB to confirm. That's the obvious part.
- When you did click LMB, Blender show the location for each extra vertex. Each location is computed as a percentage of each edge that will be subdivided. It's not what I want, because it doesn't place every extra vertex at the same distance from the edge we want to sharpen, resulting in a non-constant curvature radius. Ugly.
- So when you're still at this step, press P to quit the "percentage" mode (pressing P again will bring you back to it) Now, Blender enters another mode, making it placing it every extra vertex at the same distance from the edge we want to sharpen.
- To confirm this mode is activated, Blender shows a pink (with the default theme) square on a vertex. If this vertex is not on the edge we want to sharpen, just press FKEY to switch. If you want another vertex of the edge we want to sharpen, use the scrolling wheel.
- Then, you can see at the bottom of the 3D view the distance (in Blender units) between the edge we want to sharpen and the new edge. Press and hold on SHIFT during mouse movement to choose more precisely the distance.

As a rule of thumb, I always use 0.005 as distance, that is, 5 mm with my modeling scale. I think it give pretty good results.

Therefore, the main issue you will be facing is to create carefully your mesh to make sure the Ctrl+RKEY feature will correctly add the vertices.

I hope this help.



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