<Return to the Table of Contents> Common Bevel Shaping Tools The Bevel, Chrome and Glass filters all share the same tools for designing—yes, you guessed it—bevels. All of the controls appear under the Basic and Bevel Profile tabs. Bevel Controls Under the Basic Tab The following controls appear in the Basic control tab in each of the bevel enabled filters. Bevel Width Controls the horizontal distance between the lowest and highest points in your bevel. Increasing Bevel Width. Bevel Height Controls the amplitude of the bevel. Note: The Glass filter does not have a Bevel Height control; the height is automatically set to an optimum level. Increasing Bevel Height. Smoothness Controls how ridged or smooth your bevel will appear. Increasing Smoothness. Note: You will sometimes see ridges in bevels when the original selection is not completely smooth. To eliminate the ridges, increase the Smoothness value to soften irregularities in the selection boundary. In selections within a layer, an undesirable side effect of the smoothing is that the selection boundary can shrink by a small amount, causing rings or halos to appear around the effect. To prevent this yucky effect, we recommend that you run the filter on an unselected object in a layer with transparency. The object may shrink slightly because of the edge smoothing technique, but you won't see any halos or undesirable artifacts. Round Corners Cuts a radius into the sharp corners of your selection. High values will significantly eat away at the original selection, so use with caution (unless you dig that sort of thing). Increasing Round Corners. Bevel Placement Inside selection—Select this option to place a bevel that builds inward from the selection edge. Outside selection—Select this option to place a bevel that ripples away from the exterior of the selection edge. Darken Deep Areas Controls shading in the low areas of your bevel. High values invert the effect, making it look like a carving, rather than a protruding bevel. Shade Interior Clicking this box will darken the non-beveled portions of your selection. Surface Selects a textured surface for the bevel. Select None for a smooth surface. Note: The Glass filter does not have a Surface control. The following options are available: None—Bump Depth and Bump Spacing controls are unavailable. Pits Lumps Rough Left to right: Pits, Lumps, Rough. Bump Depth Controls the depth of the dips in the selected Surface texture. Bump Spacing Zooms the bumps in and out. High values yield a close up view; the bumps grow larger and the spacing between each increases. Random Seed Controls the random elements of this filter. Click it until you get a result you like. Bevel Profile Tab Bevel Profile Editor Filters which include bevel functionality—Bevel, Chrome and Glass—share the same bevel shaping tools under the Bevel Profile tab. Here, you specify the shape of your bevel, as if you were shaping the cross-section of the final, rendered effect. There are two ways to go about selecting a bevel shape: Using a factory profile Create a custom profile Using a Factory Profile This choice is for the lazy folks. Factory profiles are the most commonly used bevel profiles and for a couple of good reasons: they look great without much fuss and going crazy with custom bevel profiles can get plain ugly if you don’t know what you’re doing. To use a factory profile: Choose the Factory Profile option. Select one of the profiles. Tweak the effect to perfection in the other control tabs. Click OK to apply your beveled effect. Factory Profile The Factory Profile option contains the following commonly used, simple bevel profiles: Button Flat Concave Flat Carve Rounded Carve Rounded Peak Rounded Groove Sharp Peak Sharp Groove Double Rounded Rolling Slope To quickly preview the common bevel profiles, make a simple selection, run the filter and scroll through the list. Custom Profile For you, our smarty pants users, we offer an editor that gives you precise control over the shape of your bevels. The interactive cutaway view allows you to add and shape ridges in the profile. Before we examine the process step-by-step, we'll label the profile shaping tools in the following interface example. Drag control points, such as (A) and (B), to manipulate the bevel profile shape. The enlarged control point (A) is the active control point, indicating that the point is editable. When a control point is editable, you can drag it around, to change the curvature or position of a ridge in your bevel. You can also delete the active control point by clicking Delete (D) or, simply dragging the point out of the preview window. When a point is deleted, the two adjacent points connect directly. A special cursor pops up over control points when you mouse over them. When the cursor appears, click the control point to make it active. To add new points to the profile, click anywhere on the profile line. When you activate a point, you can select the Sharp Corner (C) option, which forces a sharp angle, rather than a smooth curve between adjacent control points. Here’s a step-by-step method for creating complex bevel shapes: Choose the Custom Profile option. (Optional) Add control points to the bevel profile. Click and drag the points until you're satisfied with the profile shape. Note: If you really hate something you added, remember that Eye Candy provides unlimited undos. Experiment with sharp corners. Click OK. <Return to the Table of Contents>