Bevels create ngons

Hello and thanks for reading this.

How can I bevel an edge and not get an ngon on the ends? I have looked at a tun of videos and almost all of them make ngons when they show you how to use the bevel tool and they never address it.

I found a thread where they kind of sort of talk about it here.

However there answer seems to be to add more supporting geometry witch is fine but I still don’t understand how to do that in such a way as to make my beveled edge transition into a non beveled surface.


Here is a simplified example of what I’m talking about I want the beveled edge to transition into the curved faces next to it. In this picture There are now 3 ngons around the end of the bevel.

I have tried to use the ctr T comand and then convert to quads but that makes it worse when I add smoothing and subsurf.

I need to bevel some edges to get my mesh to match my high poly close enouph to not get artifacts in my bake. I can usually find solutions to stuff like this however I have been scouring the web for a couple days to no avail. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Even with ngons you shouldn’t get any noticeable artifacts when baking. What is your distance setting set at?

I actually haven’t tried to bake it out yet I just wanted to get my low poly correct before I make my high. Everything I’ve read says ngons are a no no. I don’t want to put a bunch of time into my high poly just to have to start over on my low if I can help it. Is there no way to do this without ngons?

I have been trying to reply for days now however because I am new all my posts get stuck waiting for an admin to look at them I guess… Anyway I seem to get pinching if I leave the ngons in. Is there any tricks to doing this without ngons?

To the best of my knowledge, there is no way to tell the bevel tool to not create n-gons. You will have to bevel, then clean up the n-gons manually. This may require alterations to the surrounding topology.

In the image you posted, that could mean collapsing one of the edges on the little n-gon and adding edges to cut the remaining big n-gons into quads or tris.

Put another way, the large faces on your current model are too large to accommodate what you need. You’ve made it a little too low-poly.

Thanks guys. That sounds like good advice to fix the little ngon first then adding edges to the larger faces as needed. I’ll see what I can do.

The other way is to select complete loops, although then you may end up with more geometry than you want.