Advanced Bevel

Blender 3.3 – 5.2 · Windows, macOS and Linux · no engine required

A bevel whose corners never collapse. Blender's own bevel builds the topology; then every corner the bevel runs around becomes a handle you can shape — its depth, spread and vertex count, with the profile live — all before you confirm.

It appears in Blender's add-on list as Tachyon Advanced Bevel, so it groups with the other Tachyon Studio tools there.

Getting started

The problem it solves

Blender's bevel draws the bevel's inner edge on each face as a parallel offset of that face's outline. On a straight edge that is exactly right. Around a rounded corner every offset direction points at the arc's centre, so a bevel run around the corner tightens as the width grows — it collapses to a single point when the width reaches the corner's radius, and past it the vertices cross over and the corner turns inside out.

How it works

Using the editor

With nothing selected, every edit applies to all corners at once. The panel at the bottom of the viewport carries the same actions as clickable chips, and H shows or hides the full list of shortcuts. The bare mouse wheel stays Blender's zoom.

The profile

Every vertex across the bevel — not just the rail on either face — is laid out afresh along the profile between the two rails, evenly spaced, so a corner pushed deeper or wider keeps a clean profile rather than bunching its rows.

Spread

Ctrl + Wheel widens or tightens the selected corner along the n-gon's own rail — the face the bevel runs around. The radius changes about the point where its two straight edges would meet if the corner were sharp, so the tangent points slide along those edges and stay on them. U switches between giving every selected corner the same length or the same multiple of its own size.

Select All picks the n-gon's own rail, not the rails on the far side of the strip: those are the neighbouring faces' boundaries, and spreading them would pull apart geometry that has nothing to do with the bevel.

Corner vertices

Alt + Wheel doubles or halves a rounded corner's vertex count, and Ctrl + Alt + Wheel changes it one vertex at a time. The new vertices land on the fitted circle, so the corner gets rounder rather than denser.

A bevel can densify an arc it already has, but not round a single-vertex corner into one: its rails carry profile columns that would have to be rebuilt with it. Rounding a sharp corner is Edit Corners (Shift + Alt + C), which is in the Bevel too as of 1.1.0.

Structural edges

A selection where three or more bevelled edges meet at one vertex (the corner of a box, or a whole rounded strip selected at once) bevels like any other. Blender builds a patch of new geometry where the edges meet, and that patch is exactly Blender's own at any width, along with everything that touches it. Every corner around it is still a handle you can widen, spread and give vertices.

Clamp Overlap stops a bevel that runs into existing geometry (an edge whose end meets a bevel already there, say) at the vertex it runs into. With Auto Merge on, it lands on that vertex and welds to it when you confirm.

The foot of an extrusion

Bevel the ring of edges around the base of an extruded shape, and the faces around it on the surface below come up as one outline with its own corners. Before 1.1.0 each of those faces was a separate corner of one vertex.

• A round corner grows around its own centre. Every vertex goes straight out from the round, and its first and last vertices go out square to the straight sides beside them, so the straights stay parallel to the extrusion.
• Spread widens or tightens that round with its ends sliding along the straights. With Clamp Overlap on, it stops before the round runs off the face or into the extrusion.
• The extrusion's wall carries the other side of the bevel. Its round is one corner too, left exactly where Blender's bevel puts it, since its vertices can only move up the wall. Spreading it slides the round along the wall at the same height. With Clamp Overlap on it can widen but not tighten past the wall's own round, which would cut across the extrusion.
• Clamp Overlap holds the ring at the far edge of the faces it crosses.

Structure: which vertices are one corner

A round made of many small faces (the side of a rounded corner, say) is read as one corner across all of them, not a corner per face.

[ and ] move the turn a vertex has to make to count as a corner (Shift for fine steps). Because finding a corner is not the same as taking it over, the geometry is Blender's at every setting.

Shift + J takes a run apart into a corner per vertex — handles without any change of shape, since each one is still exactly where Blender put it. J puts any of them back together. Neither moves anything: both are structure. From there each corner has its own depth, and giving one a spread hands that corner to the solver while its neighbours stay as they were.

Auto Merge

M lets corners fuse as they meet instead of being held back. Whenever two vertices meet they become one, which carries on along the bisector of the two edges left either side of it, and confirming welds them.

Auto Merge starts on whenever Clamp Overlap is on, which is the default. A bevel that runs into the structure beside it then joins it instead of stopping dead against it. M turns it off for the session.

Clamp Overlap

C toggles the caps. A corner is held by whichever is tightest: its own vertices meeting, a corner across a real straight, the far side of the shape, or the geometry the bevel runs into at the end of its edge. The corners cut out of one smooth run are one curve, so neither cap applies between them: widening one never stops it against its neighbour or breaks the shape.

Turning Clamp Overlap on also turns Auto Merge on (see Auto Merge).

Copy and paste

Ctrl + C opens a list of what the selection carries (distance, spread, vertex count, mode, the options, and the profile's segments, shape and offset type as one row), each with its current value beside a tick box. Ctrl + V shows the same list holding what was copied, onto whatever is selected now. The clipboard outlives the editor, so settings carry from one bevel to the next.

• Spread is copied as a length, so the same number is the same size on any corner: 0.3 copied off a round corner is 0.3 on a sharp one.
• The vertex count reads N vertices, and pastes onto any round corner, including one that is still a single vertex.

The menu

Shift + Alt + Y opens the tools as a pie or a dropdown — whichever the preferences say. It carries:

• Bevel (Editable) — this add-on's bevel.
• Blender Bevel — Blender's own, unchanged, for when a plain bevel is exactly what you want.

Each entry can be switched off in Preferences ▸ Menu.

Every control

Every key above except confirm and cancel can be changed in the add-on preferences, and any of them can take Ctrl, Shift or Alt (on a Mac, also Cmd, with Alt shown as Option). The ones that go up and down (the wheel rows, S, P and [ ]) can each be the wheel with any modifiers, or a pair of keys: one for up, one for down.

Preferences

Limits worth knowing

• Where three or more bevelled edges meet, the patch Blender builds is Blender's own. It follows the width but has no handles of its own.
• A single-vertex corner cannot take a vertex count on the bevel — see Corner vertices.
• Corner vertex counts and Auto Merge are declined on Blender 3.3. Both change topology, and that build's bmesh is intermittently fatal at the Python teardown which follows such operator sequences — nothing in Python can prevent it. 3.4 and later are fine; everything else works on 3.3.
• The profile between the rails is evenly spaced, which differs slightly from Blender's own parameterisation. It is what lets the profile controls work live without rebuilding the bevel.
• Auto Merge on a partly bevelled run is built to fuse corners meeting across a straight; within one smooth run there is no straight to meet across, so leave it off there.
• There is no redo panel. It would re-run the bevel on geometry that is already bevelled and discard every per-corner edit, so the operator does not offer one. Ctrl + Z undoes the whole bevel in a single step, and bpy.ops.tbv.bevel(thickness=...) still works from a script.

Troubleshooting

Network use and files written

None, and almost none. The add-on opens no sockets, sends no telemetry and checks no licence. The Documentation and Discord buttons hand a URL to your default browser and nothing more.

Release history

Support

Questions, bug reports and feature requests — join the Discord. The same invite is in the add-on preferences, next to a link back to this documentation.

GPL-3.0-or-later. Copyright 2026 Tachyon Studio.