- [ Instructor] The chamfer tool is a very powerful,
and necessary one
for enhancing the realism of especially hard surface models
like this pergola column.
As I discussed earlier,
there's no such thing as a perfectly sharp corner
in the real world.
Everything's got some amount of roundness to it.
And this pergola column here
if we dial in with ctrl + alt middle mouse,
we'll see that currently,
it's got these unrealistic sharp corners everywhere.
We can fix this actually quite easily,
using the chamfer tool of Editable Poly.
Chamfer is implemented as a modifier,
and as a tool within Editable Poly.
And it's mostly the same.
A modifier is going to give you some more bells and whistles.
Some more options,
and some stuff that you couldn't do with Editable Poly.
And if you want to drill down deeply into that,
I covered some of that in my weekly series, videos max,
tips, tricks and techniques.
Here, We're just going to look at the basics
of the chamfer tool that's built into Editable Poly,
keeping in mind that this is completely destructive.
We won't have the ability to change the chamfer
effect after we've done it.
Unless we use the undo tool or we've saved out a version.
I'll select that pergola column.
And I want to make sure I'm in modify mode.
That is that the modify panel is visible.
And I want to select just the outer edges of the model.
I don't want to chamfer for example, these interior edges.
That's really going to be problematic.
It's going to add a whole bunch of unnecessary detail.
Well, it just so happens that in this case
all these outer perimeter edges are currently hard edges.
They don't have any smoothing applied.
These edges that are interior are actually soft edges.
They're smoothed,
and we can easily select all the hard edges
and none of the soft or smoothed edges.
Let's do that.
We'll go to edge sub-object mode in the modeling ribbon.
Then go to the selection tab,
and we have a button labeled hard.
Click on that button,
and only the hard edges are selected.
And we can investigate this
with wire frame mode with F3.
And we can see that all the edges that are actually
on corners of the model are selected.
And none of the edges that are not corners are selected.
And we can see that at the top too, at the capital.
If we go up there, these edges are not selected.
All right, let's go back down to the pedestal
or the base here.
Go back to shaded mode F3.
And with all of those edges selected, we can do our chamfer.
Go back to the modeling tab,
and in the edges panel,
we have a button for chamfer and just like with extrude,
we need to access the Chamfer options.
Hold down Shift and click the chamfer button.
And that'll launch up the Caddy.
We have lots of controls in here.
We're not going to cover all of it, but just the basics.
Most importantly, we need some amount
to the Chamfer.
Right now We've got the chamfer amount of zero.
That's actually creating some corrupt geometry here.
I've actually got a hole in my model.
Let's just increase that chamfer amount
to some non-zero value.
But it's going to need to be a very small value in this case,
because we've got a very small area here
that we want to chamfer.
Let's set the chamfer amount to 0.25 cm,
and press Enter.
It's getting really close with ctrl + alt and middle mouse.
And we can change up some more of these parameters.
For example, the number of segments.
That's pretty important.
So we have a number here.
Connect edge segments.
And this is going to control the level of detail
for the chamfer.
And we've got one segment currently.
If we bring that down to zero, we'll get a flat chamfer,
not affiliated or rounded corner.
If we increase the number of edge segments,
we'll get more and more roundness there.
And we can see actually, as we change this,
if we look closely, we'll see some changes
to the shading on these big flat faces here.
Okay. So if I reduce the number of segments,
or increase the number of segments,
I can see the color or the brightness of these faces change.
And that's just kind of what happens.
It's the way that edge smoothing works in 3D.
As we increase the number of segmentation,
we're going to get better smoothing
on these big flat areas here.
Once we bring this up to a value of four or so,
then it kind of stabilizes,
and we get a sort of consistent result to the shading.
Well, this is kind of an issue,
because a value of four is going to be pretty heavy.
We're adding quite a lot to our model here.
And our viewers may not be able to see that.
So we can try some other approaches to this.
Maybe if we bring this number of segments down
to something like two, which is more reasonable,
we can also play around with the smoothing options.
And that's down here at the bottom of the Caddy.
And currently smoothing is enabled here.
You can try turning that off,
and it'll be easier to see the result
if we turn off the edged faces in our view port with F4,
and maybe get in real close on one of these corners here.
So with edge smoothing turned off, we get faceting here.
And we can see that if we change the number of segments,
fewer segments will result in more faceting.
Let's bring that back up to two.
Well, I don't want to disable smoothing.
I'm going to need that on.
I can, re-enable it.
I can maybe try changing the threshold here.
Just as we saw in the smooth modifier.
We can change the Auto Smooth threshold.
And if we reduce that,
then less of the model will be smoothed.
If we increase the threshold, more of it will be smoothed.
Okay, well, that's an option.
Let's bring that back to 30 degrees.
There's also the ability to smooth only the chamfers,
and leave the rest of the model alone.
And that's this middle button here.
We can click on that.
And instead of smoothing entire object,
we can choose to smooth the chamfers only.
And this might be the optimal solution in this case
if we want a low number of segments and smooth the chamfers,
but not introduce any smoothing artifacts
on these big flat faces, then we can try this option,
which is to smooth the chamfers only.
Okay. So let's try that.
I can and click on, okay.
Or the checkbox to execute that,
and then click off of the model,
in order to deselect everything.
So we don't see any selection highlighting.
And what we've done here is we've not
smoothed the big flat faces,
and that might introduce some hard edges there,
that we might not want,
but those are our choices.
We can smooth the entire model,
or just smooth the areas that have been chamfered.
And again, we could increase the number of segments,
and that would fix the smoothing issue.
But then we would have too heavy of a model.
We don't have time to cover all the options here,
but there's actually a way to get
both of these conditions met.
A low polygon object with good smoothing everywhere.
And that would be using the weighted normals modifier.
But unfortunately that's a little bit out of scope
for this particular course.
This is probably good enough in this case.
And if we look at this from a distance
we're not going to see the issue
of the edge smoothing in that area.
So I think this is probably the best solution
under the circumstances.
Let's check in on the level of detail for the model.
Enable the statistics with the seven key on the keyboard.
And we've got a total of 900 or so polygons for this object.
And I think that's pretty good.
I think we've pretty much optimized the level
of detail and the fidelity,
by introducing just a small chamfer with only two segments.
And that's rounded off all these corners just enough,
that they'll be able to catch the light in our rentering.
And that's how to use the chamfer tool in Editable Poly.