Bevel (rounded edges) shader

MirceaKitsune

In newer versions of Blender we have a thing called the bevel shader: It internally generates a procedural normal map from geometry to simulate softness on sharp edges and make them appear more natural, without adding extra vertices thus sacrificing performance.

Considering how important this is in a realtime engine especially, I'm very curious if anyone has a shader for Godot, to obtain the same effect on any mesh around a sharp bend without extra geometry. Does anyone have something procedural that should work in Godot 4.0?

xyz

The thing in blender is software/compute shader, not a realtime shader. For realtime it would be best to precompute the normal map in Blender and export it with the mesh. Technically you could average samples from the "hard" normal map in a realtime shader but it would just be waste of computing resources because either way you need to use a normal map so why not "bake" bevels into it.

MirceaKitsune

@xyz said: The thing in blender is software/compute shader, not a realtime shader. For realtime it would be best to precompute the normal map in Blender and export it with the mesh. Technically you could average samples from the "hard" normal map in a realtime shader but it would just be waste of computing resources because either way you need to use a normal map so why not "bake" bevels into it.

That makes sense too, I can go with that solution. Was thinking of doing this for GridMap tiles, they'd be UV mapped meshes so it would work there as well. A realtime solution would be fun to have.

xyz

Realtime shader wouldn't be hart to make at all but you'll need to supply it hard object-space normal maps because fragment shaders can't sample geometry normals from surrounding fragments.

Without input normal maps, it could possibly be done as a post processing screen space effect. But that may result in some artifacts at perceived border edges. Screen space shader couldn't know the normal on the "other side".