Dev talk:Source/Development/Todo/BMesh

29-04-2011 - Cleaned the page a bit. Hope it helps. - J.

Bevel modifier

Howardt, writing that this modifier is not needed, do you mean the negative user opinions on blenderartists.org thread? Maybe they (like Michael W, who is active there) just have not found that it is possible to select individual edges for the Bevel modifier. On August I will publish a book, where I will described usage of the Bevel modifier in details. I think, that this modifier is an useful feature for "hard surface modelling" (vehicles and other machines). It helps to keep the meshes simpler. Witold Jaworski 11:15, 1 August 2011 (EDT)

Witold, it was actually Ton who made the comment that he didn't think bevel made sense as a modifier, only as a tool. It wasn't a long discussion though, so I don't think reasons were discussed. The way of making the current bevel modifier affect only certain edges is kind of hacky - a special 'bevel weight' field for edges exists solely for this purpose, and it feels that such special treatment should only be given to a core, heavily used feature. Not sure that this modifier qualifies, especially if the bevel tool works really well. (I do understand that having it as a modifier can make modeling easier in cases where one wants to edit the unbeveled mesh after beveling.) I'd be interested to hear other users' opinions here. howardt 3 August 2011.

Now I see it from your perspective, Howard. Yes, I have noticed the bevel_weight properties of each mesh edge and vertex, in the Outliner datablocks. Sure, the bevel modifier is much less needed than the "destructive" bevel command. Well, if it would require a lot of work in the new mesh code, then it should be postponed, or even discarded. (The latter possibility just in the ultimate case. Anyway, somebody has introduced this modifier and all its data structures to 2.49, over three years ago. They were ported to Blender 2.5. If it had been absolutely unusable, it would have not been ported to this new version... Or they were ported just "inertially"?) Witold Jaworski 16 August 2011 (EDT)

Bevel as a modifier makes a lot of sense because it's non destructive. Undoing or changing a bevel operation on massive models can take hours of monkey work, instead changing a modifier setting is instant. I say this based on real work experience ZanQdo 16 August 2011

OK, after this discussion and some more discussion in IRC, bevel as a modifier is a useful feature and should stay on TODO list. A good idea for implementation is to use a custom data layer instead of dedicated fields in the edge structure. howardt 17 August 2011.