Inset
Last updated
Last updated
The Inset Type uses face selection and mark sharp edges to generate the panel cut details. If you fail to provide both then you will see the "No selected edges and/or marked sharp edges" warning message at the bottom of the viewport.
You need to mark sharp the edges first that will be the panel cut detail then select the faces that sorround these marked sharp edges to create the effect.
The marked sharp edges also needs to be contiguous meaning they need to end in a closed loop on marked sharp edges too or in nonmanifold/boundary edges.
If the marked sharp edges does not end on vertices with marked sharp edges or on boundary edges as mentioned above it could result to pinching shown in Figure 2.
The generated panel cut detail are composed of what is called "panel islands" or "face islands". These are sets of faces that make up a selection of faces sorrounded by the marked sharp edges. They are separated from other panel islands and each can have a different setting when you use randomization or toggle off the unified value.
The terminilogy "inset depth" and "extrusion" are both used to describe the offset of the panel islands.
Listed below are the properties under inset type and what they do.
The Even Offset property when enabled makes the extrusion of the panel islands straight in sharp corners or edges. Toggling this off will make the panel island depth average the sorrounding faces for extrusion or thickness instead.
Turning off Even Offset will also let you avoid geometric spikes when you make a panel cut on tight areas of the mesh.
The Thickness property determines the scale of each individual insetted or extruded panel islands thereby affecting the size of the panel cut details.
You can also toggle off the uniform toggle icon to use a randomized min/max value that will generate different scales for each individual panel island.
This will only appear if you toggle off the uniform value toggle for the thickness property. This will let you use a seed number that will generate its own random result.
The Depth property determines the thickness of the panel island extrusion.
This also has a uniform toggle and when turned off will give you a randomized min/max value that will generate different extrusion thickness for each individiul panel island.
This will only appear if you toggle off the uniform value toggle for the depthproperty. This will let you use a seed number that will generate its own random result.
The Margin property creates a margin for each individual panel island.
The Clear Faces property consists of 3 options: None, Inner and Outer. This lets you remove certain faces from the panel islands to create interesting effects.
Inner will delete the top faces of the extruded panel islands while Outer will remove the side faces from the extrusion.
This property will show up when using Clear Faces: Outer on top of the margin property. The thickness and depth will also be renamed to outer thickness and outer depth.
Basically this will let you create the thicknes and depth effect on the resulting faces of the Clear Faces: Outer result. Set these values to 0 to turn them off.
The Bevel Offset property will let you bevel the corner verts of the panel islands.
This corner beveling will only affect vertices with 2 connected edges. As you can see in Figure 14, some of the corner vertices inside are not being beveled because they have 3 linked edges which when beveled will create complex and messy topology.
This property also has a uniform toggle which is off by default and when turned on will use a uniform value for all corner bevels instead of using a random min/max value.
The Bevel Segment property lets you set how many segments there are in the corner bevel.
The Bevel Angle or limit property lets you select the angle to bevel the corner vertices. This angle is determined by the 2 linked edges of the vertex. In most cases, the default angle of 30° is okay.
The Bevel Seed property will show up if the bevel offset uniform toggle is off. It will randomize between the mix/max value to get the bevel offset strength.
The Material Index property lets the resulting panel cut mesh inherit a material from the active or work mesh.
The default value of -1 means it will use the active material in the work mesh if that material exists.
Using 0 and above means you will be using the 1st material in the material stack when using 0, the 2nd material when using 1 and so forth.
Using a material stack number when that material does not exist will assign no material to the resulting panel cut mesh.
The Clear Sharp toggle will let you clear the marked sharp status of any edge in the face selection you are using to generate the inset panel cut effect.
The Merge Panel toggle allows you to join the resulting panel cut mesh to the work mesh as a single mesh or object.
The boundary vertices in the panel cut mesh and the work mesh vertices will be automatically merged in the process.
The merge panel will not show up or work if you have bevel offset or is using clear faces: inner or outer.
The Floater Mesh toggle will turn off all ray visibility properties for the panel cut mesh except for camera. These settings can be found in the properties editor in the object properties and in the visibility section.
With these settings off, it will make the new panel cut mesh look like a part of the workmesh but in reality is actually another object.
This is a perspective trick achieved by making the panel cut mesh not render any diffuse, gloss or shadow to another object or mesh in the scene.