Photo Real Modelling - Edges

Now as the title suggests this about making your models look photo real. When you look at items in the real world notice how very few have perfectly sharp edges and this is the same when your recreating models.

There are two ways you can soften the edges of a model, Chamfering and Round Corners. The first of these, Chamfering, is adding additional geometry to the model to give the impression of a smoother edge and catch some highlights. As you can see with this box, just by adding a simple bit of Chamfering and using the smooth modifier (though you can also do this within Edit Poly) it gives a much smoother edge which helps pick up some nice highlights.

Now this method works great but is very time consuming, especially on complex models which is where Round Corners comes in. This is a option within Arch & Design materials, under the Special Effects roll down so you can only use it if your using Mental Ray as your renderer of choice. Within these sets of options it allows you to set the radius of the fillet as well as a blending option between other materials.

So as you can see that just by enabling this option it allows you to quickly add a nice smooth edge to this box without any further modelling.

An important point to mention to help you achieve photo real models is that modelling is only one step. If the lighting, texturing, scene or render is not done or set up correctly then however great your model is, it won't be showed off to it's full extent and will be let down by one of the above. It is worth spending some time learning how to do the above skills to help you really push your models to the next level.