Bevel Modifier Hack
Chris Plush writes:
In this tutorial I’ll show you a quick hack for the bevel modifier that prevents those pesky shading issues from occurring when you smooth shade your object. Normally you’d have to add some extra geometry near beveled edges to fix this but I’ll show you a quick way to automate this and also demonstrate the limitations of other methods.
you also can select those zig-zag-faces and change the face sharing to “flat”. done… no shading artifacts anymore.
or change the normals of those faces to point in the exact same direction.
i mean, make only the round bevel endges smooth shading.
Flat shading the side faces will leave a sharp line where the flat shading ends and the smooth shading begins. Changing the normals of just those faces with no smooth falloff into the bevel seems like it would also break the smoothing across the faces and leave a line, but normals may be an option still as someone mentioned a “normal weighting” add-on which I never heard of but might look into. The Data Transfer modifier for copying normals from one object to another is *so* close to working but leaves a few minor issues that bother me.
the main problem is that the normals inside the zig-zag-side-face (the small long faces that supports the bevel corners) do not point to the same direction for some reason and those tiny distortions causes the shading to look ugly.
i would wish an way easier way to fix – your solution is too complicated to me.
but my way leaves sharp visible edges as you said.
maybe in addition do inset the zig.zag.fside-faces a tiny little bit, before make them flat, to get rid of the hard jump from smooth shading to flat shading.
Stay tuned, about to record a video with a 2 second fix using that plug-in I mentioned. It’s quite awesome.
The link above has an updated video now. The weighted normals add-on works wonderfully though not 100% perfect. But it only takes a second to use and it’s perfect enough for many things.