Supporting Edges vs Bevels vs Creasing for 3d game art and cinematics?

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  gnoop sublime tool

  Jan 5 2026

  I am accustomed to use custom and often parallel or perfectly radial on cylindrical forms   vertex normals and  transfer them to lods .  That way it works independent  of any topology and  through several lod levels usually .   Support lops and bevels don't survive through lods very well .   Also I often transfer /use  same UVs on hi-res meshes so baking is just worlds space to tangent space conversion instead of tedious cage tweaks .    This is considered an ancient way nowadays  although, not supported by popular tools very well.   It's beside the fact the lods are done automatically in many engines now and people stopped to care about them at all.     We haven't yet. 

  Yet it's mostly an old habit  .    Painter works pretty fine  in most cases with automatic projection.   

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  Neox grand marshal polycounter

  Jan 6 2026

  supporting edges / quad chamfers and creases are sorta same same but different.

  
  

  supporting edges give you better control over the edgequality, as in, its always going to be the same width as per your setting, while with creases the result is highly based on the surrounding geo. its just a slight mindset shift, creases are usually considered easier and can also be mixed with support geo to help control the edge quality.

  
  

  i dunno why you think it is helpful for lowpoly creation (maybe for midpoly if wastage isnt an issue), to me in most cases its rather a different means to creating the highpoly to be baked down onto the low.

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  amankart polycounter lvl 6

  Jan 8 2026

  Neox said:

  supporting edges / quad chamfers and creases are sorta same same but different.

  
  

  supporting edges give you better control over the edgequality, as in, its always going to be the same width as per your setting, while with creases the result is highly based on the surrounding geo. its just a slight mindset shift, creases are usually considered easier and can also be mixed with support geo to help control the edge quality.

  
  

  i dunno why you think it is helpful for lowpoly creation (maybe for midpoly if wastage isn't an issue), to me in most cases its rather a different means to creating the high poly to be baked down onto the low.

  Thanks for the reply.
  
  1. What use cases would I use creasing for over the other 2 options? It seems to be used for keep certain edges sharp and hard. but by that logic wouldn't it only apply to weapons or props with blades or something sharp? 
  In the reference below, the artist mentioned the high poly is a mix of subD and creased edges. 
  
  2. Same logic with the second image. The artist made a low poly and used creasing on the high poly. In the case of the second image though, im not sue where the creasing would apply since the model has many natural bevels. Just a bit lost on when its applicable and when its not?
  
  3. Can creasing and support loops be used together for sub d modeling or am i using either or? all the videos I've seen so far focus on support loops to sub d model. If that's the case, why crease?
  
  4. And lastly, if i don't use support loops, what does my sub d modeling workflow look like? 
  
  Apologies if these seem like silly foundational questions. I have yet to find a lot of clarity on creasing is all.
  
  

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  Neox grand marshal polycounter

  Jan 9 2026

  You, personally can mix and match whatever methods you wanna mix and match.
  In production, usually a common ground, a ruleset is defined, to make things interchangeable between artists. 
  
  You can use creases on anything you would use support geo for. Its very similar, you will usually just end with denser base meshes to control edge quality across your asset.
  
  In case of sculpting, I'd argue that bases made with creases are preferable because it creates a more even mesh density while support geo tend to bunch up geometry around hard edges. Which makes sculpting over a pain usually.
  
  As for your pictures, I'd assume the high poly to be baked down was done with creases, not the lowpoly itself. Possibly the lowpoly was made first. Then creases applied to generate a highpoly. Very possible to walk from low to high and bake it back down, rather than building a highpoly then retopo or optimize to make the low.
  
  As about your workflow, again it is very similar. In a modifier based software (blender, max) its very much the same. Select edges to mark as sharp, either apply a quad chamfer or a smooth based on creases
  
  Same same, but different 
  
  Can show some when on a PC

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  Neox grand marshal polycounter

  Jan 9 2026

  here we go, this is is all the same mesh from the left with different settings and levels of support applied.

  1. being the base

  2. with support geo/quad chamfers

  3. unaltered creases

  4. bit of support geo

  5. fully supported

  

  
  

  lemme explain

  support loops can carry a lot of stuff such as the flat top in this case as it offsets the problematic areas into the flat surface

  

  this would break on curved surfaces, and similar things as with creases would happen

  
  

  when smoothed with creases this will happen and you can immediately see why the top and bottom break, there is no offset to carry the issues into the flat surfaces

  

  
  

  by offsetting it a bit you mitigate this issue

  

  
  

  not sure if you notice but there is a distinct difference between the edge quality of the support geo version and the creased one and that has to do with surface density around the hard egde

  
  

  you can compensate this by adding more density to the surrpounding geometries basically you want the surrounding geo to be evenly disttributed around the edges to make sure they are even all around. this is the biggest drawback of this workflow, support geo / quad chamfers will always be more precise than creases, but in many cases this precision doesnt matter all that much, and good enough is just... good enough

  
  

  

  left is support loops, middle is the same mesh as on the right, but smoothed

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