[Bf-modeling] Bevel requirements

[Howard Trickey]

I have now triaged and about to attack the bevel bugs in tracker.

A number of them are really feature requests, in that they want an
algorithm that does something different than what the bevel algorithm does
today (and there are reasons for why it does what it does today).  I'd like
to start a discussion of what bevel should really do -- where it should
change what it does today, and where we should just add more options.

E.g., see
https://projects.blender.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=34504&group_id=9&atid=498

A start of what will eventually become the developer documentation for the
bevel code is here:

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Howardt/Bevel

This start is about how does one measure the 'bevel amount' (currently
called 'offset' in the interface).  Please read.  You can see that there
are 4 alternatives, each with something to recommend themselves.  I propose
(and have already implemented, but not submitted) giving all 4 options to
the user, with 'Along Face' the default.

Questions for this list:
- Is this a good idea?  Should I submit it?
- Are there better names for the methods?
- Should I change the name 'offset' in the interface to something else
('amount', maybe?); it would be kind of annoying to change the code at this
point, since the field persisted in .blends is called 'offset'.
- Should 'Percentage' perhaps be 'Fraction'?  I don't remember what is
common in Blender, to enter such numbers as between 0 and 100, or between
0.0 and 1.0.  One problem with leaving it as Percentage is that the numbers
are way out of range with the numbers used for the other three methods, and
I probably have to figure out how to scale the interactive number
differently when Percentage is used.  So I would prefer this to be
'Fraction'.

There are other questions about how to deal with problems when all
constraints can't be met (when beveling several edges together); and more
about the algorithm used to fill in rounded corners; I'll fill in the
discussion about those later.

- Howard
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