Modeling, Rigging & Texturing a Sedan-Like Car with 3ds Max & UE5

Beveling

As this car was a part of The Projects environment, it would naturally follow a similar modeling and texturing pipeline that I used on the other props and modules.

First, I finished the entire car with all of its geometric parts, but kept the edges sharp and low poly. The next step was to add fake bevels to the edges of every single mesh save for the smallest bolts and spacers. To keep this part consistent, I used a range of .4 to 1.0 values for the bevels’ width on most objects, .2 to .3 for small ones, and I would do 1.0 to 4.0 for the thickest bevels. Anything above these on a convex edge would receive a real bevel during the previous stage of modeling to avoid the issue where the silhouette obviously doesn’t match the normals direction.

The reason I like this technique is that it’s easy to apply. You can adjust the width of the bevel by moving control edges at any time, and it doesn’t require a lot of extra geometry. There is no need for weighted normals, it keeps the original shape of the model, which allows you to cleanly backtrack and redo it if need be, and all that eventually saves a lot of time while not being a huge visual compromise.