Give hard-surface assets the look of rounded edges without adding geometry or high-poly sources. InstaMAT’s bevel baker delivers clean, production-ready normal maps that improve lighting and visual quality while keeping polygon counts low and performance high.
InstaMAT’s latest tutorial shows artists how to bake convincing bevel normals onto low-poly meshes, delivering the look of smooth rounded edges without adding geometry or high-poly source models.
The process begins in the Baker. With no high-poly input required, activating the Bevel Normals option reveals controls for sample count, bevel radius, jitter, and surface offset. After baking, the resulting map is simply assigned to the material’s tangent-space normal slot. Sharp edges instantly soften while the original low-poly topology remains unchanged.
Iterative refinement is straightforward: reduce radius, tighten ray lengths, and lower jitter to eliminate noise. The same settings can be dialed interactively inside the Element Graph for real-time preview before transferring them back to the Baker for final production maps.
The technique preserves runtime performance, simplifies pipelines, and produces normal maps compatible with any modern engine. Artists gain polished hard-surface detail at a fraction of the usual cost, making the bevel baker a valuable addition to efficient real-time workflows.
About Abstract
Abstract is a deep-tech company pioneering 3D and AI technology. Its products empower game developers, VFX and film, enterprise, XR, and metaverse industries to deliver efficiently with massive cost savings. InstaLOD converts CAD to 3D, optimizes geometry and automates 3D pipelines, InstaMAT introduces generative materials and scalable texturing, Polyverse enhances cloud-based asset management and 3D data processing as a service, while RSX Engine enables real-time collaboration and cloud synchronization when building 3D applications and games. Abstract is driving breakthrough innovation in 3D and AI across industries.