the bevel tool is very helpful in three D modeling because
it allows you to keep the realism in your hard edges
in real life.
No edges perfectly sharp like it is in the
flat shaded cube that we have here for example
because no edges perfectly sharp most of the time you're going to want
to bevel it in some way to keep the edges hard but realistic.
So let's demonstrate what beveling is.
There are two ways to bevel.
You can either use the bevel tool in edit mode
or you can use the bevel modifier
to use the tool,
simply select the tool in the quick tools menu on the left while in edit mode
let's go ahead and hit a to select all of our mesh.
Then left click drag anywhere in the view port
to begin adding a bevel to your selection.
Let go of left click to confirm
for hot key users, you can press control be
as usual, right click to cancel and left click to confirm.
Like many tools after you confirm the action,
an operator panel will appear in the bottom left,
this gives you several more settings to tweak before finalizing the action.
For example,
you can change the width type which are simply
different ways of calculating the amount of bevel.
The width is the value. You can left click drag to adjust the bevel amount
as for segments.
This setting lets you change the resolution of
the bevel as the more segments you have,
the rounder, your corners can be
and profile adjusts the curvature of your beveled edges
checking vertex only option will only bevel using vertex
is instead of edges as the source geometry,
this will look very different but can be helpful for certain situations
for hockey users. You can also press control shift be instead of control be
to access the vertex only beveled directly.
Most of the other settings are perfectly fine at default values but material
is a very powerful one that I want to talk about real quick
to demonstrate what this does.
Let's go ahead and add a few materials to our object by
pressing the plus key and the materials tab of our properties editor.
We can then change the color of each material
and set our view port to rendered mode here
let's go ahead and bevel the mesh once more in edit mode and open the operator panel.
The material index allows you to use
a different material in your object material list
to do cool things like this.
The material index is correlated to the materials position in the list.
Another way to bevel is with the bevel modifier,
simply go to the wrench icon for the modifiers.
Tab and select bevel modifier from the drop down menu.
You can see that this has very similar settings as the bevel tool operator panel.
One important setting that differs is the limit method.
This is how you can set the threshold for one. The modifier should bevel your mesh
for example by default.
The limit method is none,
which means it will indiscriminately bevel every edge loop or vertex in your mesh.
However,
if you limit by angle you can specify
to only bevel corners that exceed a certain angle
to demonstrate this.
If we give this mesh a more varied shape,
you'll notice that changing this value allows
us to selectively bevel certain corners,
but not others.
On the other hand,
weight and vertex groups allow you to hand pick which corners get beveled
as with all modifiers.
The bevel modifier is nondestructive,
allowing you to work with your original mesh while still having
bevel applied on top of your edits with no consequence.