This is mainly for car modelers but anyone who has any experience with ‘fillets’ can join in on the discussion. I’ve been thinking about trying to make hard edges on a car mimic their real life counterparts as much as possible, however from what I’ve seen on the internet there seems to be many ways of creating hard edges, or fillets.
What is your preference to filleting and do any of you fillet differently to other people? So far I’ve gathered two techniques that people seem to use:
Where hard edges are placed you split the mesh first, add a level one subsurf and then apply it. When level one subsurf has been applied you weld the split areas and then apply a bevel to said welded area.
Bevel on the low poly base mesh or when subsurf has been added but not applied.
I was just wondering what everybody else’s thoughts were on this?
Number 1 seems extremely painful… I choose number 2.
More seriously, number 2 is the way to go if simply increasing the crease isn’t enough. You tighten your mesh just on the sharper edges with a bevel (with 2 segments to get 3 edges loops). Done! Besides, it’s easy to reproduce exactly the same bevel, even if you do it by hand. With the not-so-new Edge Slide, it’s a real pleasure to work with the Bevel tool.
I’ve just had a thought, it may also be to do with creating a base mesh. You create your base mesh, and then when you want to add more detail you collapse it with a level 1 iteration. If you have everything connected it will subdivide the to-be-beveled edges (something I personally wouldn’t want). My mesh is that dense in the photo due to it have a level 1 subsurf applied to it, if I hadn’t split the mesh then I would’ve end up with a load of unwanted edges.
I choose number 2.
