Tutorials

Round Edges with mia_roundcorners

“Hard corners don’t actually exist in nature.”

This was one of the first things my tutor told me. And so I tried to achieve round corners in all my models. For that I used mostly bevels. But this was really annoying and often resulted in mistakes in the model.

In this tutorial I will show you an easy way to get round corners without having to change the model.

Make sure your mental ray is activated. Because mia_roundcorners is a mental ray texture.

If mental ray isn’t activated you can activate it under: Window -> Settings/Preferences -> Plug-in Manager -> Mayatomr.mll and click on “Loaded”.

Now you can start creating any object. In my case I created a Polygon Cube with a Polygon Cylinder. If I render it now, you can see all the hard edges.

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To avoid that, we have to do the next steps. First you have to choose a material. Hold right click and select “Assign New Material…”

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Choose a material you want to use.

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Now go into the Attribute Editor and click on “Bump Map”

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After clicking, a new window appears. Under the mental ray section you will find textures and here mia_roundcorners.

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In the Attribute Editor you can now choose the smoothness of the edge. You don’t need high values (mostly under 0.200).

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If you want to use another bump map with other attributes for your object, you get a new possibility in the parameters-section. Only click on “Bump” again.

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Unfortunately I discovered mia_roundcorners only now. So, I now started changing some of my old models to improve them. One of them is my compass. Here you can see the difference between the previous version and the improved one using mia_roundcorners.

compass1 compass2

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