[Bf-funboard] Doing bevels without bevels

[Bassam Kurdali]

Yes, very useful, Modo has this, and, in fact, there's a developer doing
just this for cycles; I know the thread is long, but it's on the cycles
thread in blender artists. He's not ready to request a code review yet,
but he's posted some promising pictures.

On Mon, 2012-06-04 at 17:41 +0200, Knapp wrote:
> I got to thinking that bevels are great because they let the light
> bonce off edges like they do in real life, a perfect 90 as seen in a
> basic cube will not do that. Problem is that it is expensive with time
> to make it and also with the number of vertexes added to a mesh. Could
> it be done instead with a bump map or normals? I was thinking of a
> thing that would look for steep angles and then set the normals on
> those places to round out corners and make for good edge lighting.
>