Yes, I really hope that new bevel will have option for face weighted normals. There is interesting reddit post about this workflow becoming increasingly common even in games, since next gen games can afford at least one subdivision bevel/chamfer:
Unfortunately, that addon requires you to completely collapse the modifier stack, and destructively commit to the change. Having correct option to handle face weighted normals based on face angle would be a killer feature, preparing Blender for next few years of gaming industry requirements.
Basically, it all comes down to faces created by bevel modifier generating no normal modifications of their own, but instead adopting vertex normal orientation of the adjacent faces in the state prior to the introduction of bevel.
Thank you.
EDIT: I’ve just learned this exact functionality may be already in one of the builds. I will test it when I can, thank you again!
I hope we can get this GSoC 2018 Bevel branch merged into 2.8 before the end of GSoC. This includes the weighted normals branch stuff. Since the GSoC 2018 branch is based on 2.8, and active development has ceased on master (2.79…), I kind of doubt that the weighted normal stuff will get merged into master. But at some point, the 2.8 branch will become master and then the weighted normal (and bevel improvements) will be in master.
@Howard_Trickey do you consider making further improvements (besides GSoC) to the Bevel modifier before 2.8x? I’ve lately stumble upon this: https://blenderartists.org/t/wip-bevel-after-boolean/ and it looks like last step for making nice hard surface boolean driven meshes. With hardened normals of course done by @RohanRathi.
It’s like Y.A.V.N.E. Great add-on but sadly not modifier.
Whether or not more stuff besides the GSoC improvements gets done to Bevel before 2.8 is officially released depends a lot on when that release happens. I am always trying to make improvements but my time is limited by my day job. I am aware of bevel-after-boolean and how great that feature is for some, and would like to make it more part of either Bevel or Boolean modifier. But I’ve looked into it some and it is not easy to do in general. Simpler cases are not to hard but the general case is a beast.
Anyway, at the moment I am working on another project - making Boolean better able to deal with special cases of coplanar overlaps etc. I’ve spent a lot of time on it so far and am far from finished.
What does “activating the normal fix” mean? Maybe you can file a bug showing exactly how to reproduce, with a .blend, if not easy to explain here. You can assign the bug to me.,
Wazou: I cannot reproduce the crash. I think I reproduced your example. Though not sure what you have set in terms of autosmooth on the mesh data and smooth vs flat object shading, I think I tried all variants and still couldn’t make it crash. I guess I need a sample .blend file from you, and perhaps which platform you are running on. Please make a bug on developer.blender.org using the process described here. You can assign it to me and say that I asked for the report.
Alberto: indeed that is not intended behavior. There is new code to make vertex-only bevels on vertices in a plane behave better (respond to changes in profile), but looks like that code needs reining in. I’ll fix.
Wazou I edited the normal strength of the last bevel modifier first fom .50 to .60 by increments of .01 and then down to .40 by increments of .01 and blender did not crash.
