Advanced Modeling Bundle

Advanced Inset, Advanced Bevel and Advanced Extrude · Blender 3.3 – 5.2 · Windows, macOS and Linux

Three of Blender's modelling tools, held open for editing: Advanced Inset, Advanced Bevel and Advanced Extrude. All three share one idea — a rounded corner is found as a corner and moved as one piece, so it never collapses or turns inside out — and one editor: click once and every corner becomes a handle you can push to its own depth, widen, or give more vertices, all before you confirm.

They appear in Blender's add-on list as Tachyon Advanced Inset, Tachyon Advanced Bevel and Tachyon Advanced Extrude, so they group with the other Tachyon Studio tools there.

This page covers what the three have in common first, then each tool on its own. Where a control differs between them, the tool's own section says so.

Getting started

The problem they solve

Blender's inset and bevel are parallel offsets: every boundary vertex slides inward along the bisector of its two edges. On a straight edge that is exactly right. On a rounded corner — a fan of short edges — every bisector points at the arc's centre, so the arc shrinks as it goes in: a corner of radius r inset by t has radius r − t. At t = r the whole fan lands on one point, and past it the vertices cross over and the corner turns inside out.

Blender's Extrude Along Normals has the same fault from the other side. It moves every vertex along its own normal, and around a rounded corner those normals converge, so as a band is pushed inward the corner's vertices close in on each other. Past the corner radius they cross, and the outline folds over itself. Blender does all of this without complaint and leaves the repair to you.

Measured on a 0.5-radius corner: fine at 0.4, a single point at 0.5, inverted at 0.6.

How the three work

Corners are found, not declared

Each boundary is read for its corners. The inset cuts the boundary at its long edges, and every run of vertices between two of them is one corner: a rounded rectangle gives four corners of seven vertices, a chamfered one four of two, a sharp box four of one, and a circle no corners at all. The bevel reads each bevelled run the same way — a vertex that turns sharply starts a corner, a long straight ends one. The extrude reads each boundary in its own plane, and a stretch that keeps turning — the bevel strip between two sharp corners — is a corner in its own right.

Only a vertex the boundary actually turns at is a corner with a handle. A vertex partway along a straight edge belongs to the side between two corners, which on the inset and the bevel has one small dot for a handle, halfway along it, and one depth.

Blender's result is the base

The bevel's topology is always Blender's own bevel, and a corner stays exactly where Blender put it until you shape it — the editor is opt-in, one corner at a time. The extrude reads back where Blender's own extrude placed every vertex, as a direction per unit of depth, and everything after that is that direction times the depth with the corner controls on top. A quad, or a region of several faces, takes Blender's own inset for its positions. In all three, an untouched result is Blender's, vertex for vertex.

Each corner carries its own settings

Its own depth, its own spread, its own vertex count and its own mode. One face can hold four corners set four different ways.

Two modes per corner

T swaps the selection between them. The inset and the bevel start rounded corners in Keep Shape; the extrude starts in Shrink, so that an untouched extrude is Blender's.

Using the editor

The same in all three, apart from the differences the tools' own sections note.

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 reads back the selection, depth, spread, vertex count and mode as you work.

The bare mouse wheel is left alone — it stays Blender's zoom, as everywhere else. Which of Ctrl and Alt carries spread and which carries the vertex count can be swapped in each add-on's preferences, and every single-letter key can be changed there.

Spread

Ctrl + Wheel widens or tightens the selected corner. This changes the corner's radius 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 — which is what "rounder" and "tighter" mean to a modeller. Scaling about the arc's own centre would lift its ends off the edges.

S resets the selection's spread (on the bevel, S is the profile's segments instead), and U switches between giving every selected corner the same length (Absolute) or the same multiple of its own size (Relative).

Vertex count

Alt + Wheel doubles or halves the selected corner's vertex count, and Ctrl + Alt + Wheel changes it one vertex at a time. New vertices land on the fitted circle, so adding them makes the corner rounder rather than a finer version of the same chords.

On the inset and the extrude, a corner that is a single sharp vertex takes a count too, and is rounded into a fillet tangent to the two edges meeting there. The 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; use the inset's Edit Corners for that.

Merge and split

J makes the selected neighbouring corners into one corner: on the inset, a single arc tangent to both flanks, reaching as far as the old corners did, with the vertices spaced evenly along it — the end of a slab becomes a semicircle, the bottom of a notch a U, a V-notch its fillet. From then on it is one corner in every respect, and Shift + J splits it back.

On the bevel and the extrude, merging and breaking are structure only: nothing on the mesh moves when you do either. You regroup the outline first and shape it afterwards.

Corner sensitivity

[ and ] change how sharp a turn has to be, or how long an edge has to be to count as a straight run — which is what decides where one corner ends and the next begins. Shift with them steps finely, and the report line tells you how many corners the new setting found. Use it when a corner is being read as two, or when a shallow bevel is not being recognised as a corner at all. On the extrude, with corners picked, the change applies only to the boundaries those corners are on.

Nothing can cross

A corner is held by whichever cap is tightest:

The readout says (at limit) while a corner is being held back. When two corners stop against each other, the two vertices that met are left exactly touching and welded into one on confirm. C turns the caps off if you want to see what would have happened.

Auto Merge

M, on the inset and the bevel, turns on the alternative to being held back. Nothing is capped; instead the outline is swept inward as a straight skeleton, and whenever two vertices meet they become one vertex that carries on along the bisector of the two edges left either side of it. A rounded corner pushed too deep is eaten one vertex at a time until it is the sharp corner underneath, and pushed further still two corners fuse into one. Confirming welds the coincident vertices. It is off by default, because the cap is the safer default.

Copy and paste

Ctrl + C opens a list of what the selection carries — depth, spread, vertex count, mode and the options; on the bevel the profile as one row — each with its current value beside a tick box. Tick what you want and press Copy. Ctrl + V shows the same list holding what was copied, onto whatever is selected now — or onto every corner, with nothing selected.

The clipboard outlives the editor. Copy in one inset, confirm, start the next and paste, and the settings carry over — and they carry between the three tools, too, wherever the setting means the same thing.

Advanced Inset

Shift + Alt + I with faces selected. The inset follows the mouse — toward the middle of the face is deeper, away is shallower — and one click turns it into the editor.

Sides

A side follows its corners until you give it a depth of its own. Click its dot and use Shift + Wheel or I, or drag the dot, and that side goes in less or more than the rest — a shallow inset along the long sides of a panel and a deep one across its ends. The corners at its two ends slide to where the two offset edges now cross, so nothing tears. A side is only ever picked on purpose; A selects the corners.

The rim

Only the inset arc changes when a corner takes a count: the outer arc and the rest of the mesh are untouched, and the rim between them is rebuilt end to end — quads where the counts allow, triangles where they do not, carrying the rim's material, smoothing and UVs.

Quads, regions and Individual

One n-gon gets the corner solver. A quad, or more than one face, gets Blender's own inset for its positions — the only thing that is right in 3D on a selection that wraps a corner — with the corner controls laid over it. A rounded corner keeps its shape here too, in the plane of the face it was modelled in. Edge Rail (R) is off by default, as on Blender's own inset. Individual (the chip, or I while the inset still follows the mouse) insets every face on its own, as Blender's I-then-I does, each with its own corners.

Edit Corners

The same editor, on corners the mesh already has. Nothing is inset; what moves is the mesh itself. Shift + Alt + C, the toolbar, or the Face and Vertex menus.

The inset shortcut falls through to this when only vertices are selected. Changing a corner's vertex count reconnects what was attached: where the run has a parallel run beside it joined by a rail of quads — the far side of a bevel — that rail is rebuilt against the new count.

The inset's own keys

Preferences

Advanced Bevel

Shift + Alt + B with edges selected. The width follows the mouse, like Blender's own bevel, and one click turns it into the editor.

Only a face bevelled all the way round

The editor takes over where a face is bevelled all the way round — the top of a slab whose whole outline is in the selection. An edge with no corner bevels exactly as Blender's bevel does, vertex for vertex, and a face bevelled only along part of its outline keeps Blender's answer however long that part is. Even where the editor takes over, a corner stays exactly where Blender put it until you shape it — give it a spread, or a vertex count it did not already have.

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 on the rail

Spread runs along the n-gon's own rail — the face the bevel runs around. Select All picks that 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.

Structure

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. 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.

Clamp Overlap

C toggles the caps. 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.

The bevel's own keys

Preferences

Advanced Extrude

Shift + Alt + E with faces selected, or one of the four buttons in the sidebar panel. The depth follows the mouse at first, and one click turns it into the editor.

The four extrudes

All four open in the same editor, and the kind can be switched from its chip while the extrude is still open — the corners you have set are kept.

Picking and dragging

A first press only ever picks. Press a corner you already hold to drag it, and dragging is the spread, not the depth: depth travels along the normal, so dragging for it would move the dot up and down the screen in whatever direction the normal happened to point. The wheel and the I field are the depth.

Depth

Each corner, each column and the whole extrude can carry its own depth, and the sides between two corners run smoothly from one depth to the other. Shift + Wheel steps it; hold Shift as well for the fine step. A negative depth pushes into the solid instead of out of it, wherever the extrude has a direction to take it along.

Columns

On a band, the top ring and the bottom ring carry the same corners — two views of one profile. The rings are joined vertex by vertex through the band before it is extruded, so each corner knows its partner, and an edit reaches the whole column unless the Columns chip is switched off.

Spread, pinned at one end

A corner's first and last vertex are placed on the edges either side of it, each sliding along its own edge, so this holds even where the two edges are skew and never meet. The corner spreads as one piece: whichever end runs out of room first stops both. Press the dot at the run's first or last vertex and that end pins, so the round grows into the straight on the side you pressed.

Vertex count

The new vertices sweep round the corner's own arc, in its own plane, with even chords at every count. Measured on a real corner, the sharpest turn along it falls 46° → 30.7° → 15.3° → 11.5° → 7.7° as the count rises. It never leaves the mesh with more n-gons than it found. The moved copy gains the new vertices but the original outline keeps its own, so the wall between the two is bridged with triangles where the counts differ.

The extrude's own keys

Preferences

• Menu — pie or dropdown, and a checkbox for each of its six entries.
• In the editor — which of Ctrl and Alt carries spread and which carries vertex count.
• Keys in the editor — every letter key above.
• Shortcuts — Shift + Alt + E and Shift + Alt + T, in Blender's own keymap editor, with a button to restore the defaults.

The menus

Each add-on has a menu that opens as a pie or a dropdown, whichever its preferences say, and every entry on it has its own checkbox, so a menu holds only what you reach for. Blender's own tool sits on each one, unchanged.

The Inset's and the Extrude's menus share a key by default. With both installed, that key opens both — give one of them another key in its preferences, through Blender's own keymap editor, and each opens on its own.

Limits worth knowing

• On Blender 3.3, changing a corner's vertex count — and, on the inset and the bevel, Auto Merge — is declined, and says so. 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.
• There is no redo panel. It would re-run the tool on geometry that is already inset, bevelled or extruded and discard every per-corner edit, so none of the three offers one. Ctrl + Z undoes the whole thing in a single step, and bpy.ops.tin.inset(thickness=...) and bpy.ops.tbv.bevel(thickness=...) still work from a script.
• Attribute interpolation (UVs, colours) on a rim is done by Blender at the starting distance. Push a corner much deeper and the UV stretch on that rim will not follow — the same behaviour as moving the vertices after a normal inset or bevel.
• The inset's maths works in the plane of the region's average normal. On a strongly curved region it is an approximation, as any planar offset is. The extrude reads each boundary in its own plane.
• A box corner is not bevelled. Three or more bevelled edges meeting at one vertex are declined with a message rather than mangled, and a single-vertex corner cannot take a vertex count on the bevel.
• The bevel's 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 handles vertices meeting each other. A concave vertex reaching a distant edge is not a merge event, so an asymmetric concave shape pushed absurdly deep with Auto Merge on can still self-cross; the caps cover that case when it is off.
• The extrude needs faces, exactly as Blender's own extrude does, and the walls beside a re-counted corner are triangles.

Troubleshooting

Network use and files written

None, and almost none. None of the three opens a socket, sends telemetry or checks a 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 each add-on's preferences, next to a link back to this documentation.

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