bevel + subsurf problems

Hi all,

I’ve been following a tutorial that explains how to put the bevel and subsurf modifiers together to control how much roundness I want on the edges of the mesh. However, after modeling for a bit, I realized that changing the width value on the bevel does nothing for me anymore. I’m somehow stuck with an edge roundness I don’t like. I tried deleting and re-adding the modifier, and quitting the program, but the bevel isn’t really changing. On the tutorial the guy had control, and changing the bevel width value actually affected the mesh. Any ideas?

spaceship.blend (446 KB)

Thanks,
Joseph

What tutorial did you follow? Was the instructor’s model comparable to yours?

Anyway, what I think happens is that your mesh has so many tight areas already, that the Bevel modifier’s “Clamp Overlap” function (checkbox) will kick in pretty early - leaving you with an extremely narrow range for changing the bevel value until Blender just stops.


You could turn off “Clamp Overlap”, but that will cause other issues as you will see.
So, in a nutshell: Your model might simply not be suitable for this technique.

Would be best to control the beveling with bevel weight. But subdivision surface is not what you need to get rounded edges, could do that with the bevel modifier itself.

The model has non-planar polygons and you might want to add geometry to those, but could do that manually instead of subdividing everything with the modifier.

spaceship_ja12.blend (118 KB)

This is Blender Sensei’s tutorial; link to the original file is available below the video.

It does look like some regression is present on buildbot’s GB builds: Object and Sculpt Solid mode’s display is totally screwed up while Textured, Material and Rendered look ok.
GB branch hash 9880574 looks fine compared.

Bevel modifier as such has 2 states on this model - on/off; no fine tuning. This is true in 2.72 which is the version author uses i believe; video nevertheless shows different behavior. No ideas, unfortunately.

Edit: One of author’s versions was 2.71.3; Bevel modifier does behave the same - on/off.