Smooth edges shader

Coming from arch/viz I find beneficial a shader that can define the bevel radius of a mesh edges. Vray has it and a member of the Allegorithmic team created an offline version. This shaders are very useful for all those secondary meshed that would take too long to create normal maps for. This way you would speed up production time, remove ugly razor sharp edges and reduce aliasing. I wonder if there is something similar or it’s possible/reasonable to create it.
Thank you.

Hey JohnDoe0,

There is nothing within the material editor to handle this directly, and is something that would be quite expensive to implement for a single level of detail. You could take the baked normal map of a high poly model, and then follow the logic in the Substance Tutorial to develop the shader, but as mentioned, would be quite an expensive approach.

The best approach, which would take a little time, but is the most efficient and controlled, would be to bevel/chamfer the edges and assign them to the appropriate smoothing groups so the object appears correct when importing into Unreal. I understand this can be somewhat time consuming, but the workflow is optimal relative to the results you will get.

Let me know if you have further questions or need additional assistance.

Cheers,

Thank you Andrew, there is a question that I’d like to ask: while checking this by myself I tried to reproduce the same procedure as in Substance Designer (get the world position, blur and convert to tangent space) but I didn’t find any blur or convert to tangent space node. Am I missing something?

You are welcome. You can use the ‘Transform’ node to transform World to Tangent Space, and the ‘Fuzzy Shading’ material function to implement a soft transition. This won’t be a “blur” exactly, but you might be able to get away with the correct look. You could create a custom post process bendable and control the blur through that as well. This way you would only need to use the ‘Transform’ node in each material and then have it rendered correctly with a Post Process Overlay.