Selective Bevel

Hi, I’m trying to use the Bevel function, from the W menu, and it does a nice job, except for occasional artifacts. The areas of the artifacts, like inside the corners of the recessed rectangles (see pic below), are areas I didn’t want to have beveled in the first place, but deselecting them doesn’t seem to discourage the bevel function. Is there a way to bevel selectively?

http://www.deeplayer.com/dan_w/hellcat/dump.jpg

I don’t think so… it has been asked for many times, but for now it is still all or nothing.

AFAIK, isn’t extruding a face and scaling the same thing?

Use the BevelCenter script (Scripts window, Mesh menu).

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Note the script is extremely picky and can cause lots of problems. Also, after beveling an edge (or multiple edges) with it, you have to exit it and start it again before beveling the next edge or it won’t work right.

I just tried BevelCenter, it gives me an “Error: Active object must be a mesh”.

I figured that one out, I think; I’d neglected to delete the initial cube before importing the object file. Now I get a different error: “List index out of range”. I thought perhaps there was too much geometry for the script to deal with, but even if I select a small feature of the mesh I get the same error.

Update: In case this might help someone else, well, I could never figure out what caused the “list index out of range” error with Bevel Center, but I finally got Bevel from the W menu to work without putting artifacts on the mesh: by selecting pairs of triangles at a time and turning them into quads with Alt-J first, made the geometry simpler for the Bevel script to deal with. Unfortunately, where bevel lines meet, the patches there end up concave where they should be convex, and viceversa; so I got a lot of manual touch-up work ahead of me, but much less than previously. Cheers!

http://www.deeplayer.com/dan_w/hellcat/front.jpg

http://www.deeplayer.com/dan_w/hellcat/back.jpg