Rounded Dice - Why do the simplest things seem so difficult

Question

I always have trouble with bevels on top of bevels. To create this rounded dice I first bevelled the vertices of a cube at every corner and adjusted it until I got a rounded cube. I then added a subdivision and cast modifier.

But it still doesn't seem right.

I can't bevel the edges properly unless I harden the normals. If I more segments, I just end up with odd, sharp looking front faces on the dice.

This is my sixth attempt and my best attempt so far. Does anyone have any suggestions how to improve? I'm aiming for the photograph at the bottom. It appears that dice can be quite heavily rounded, but this seems to be moderately rounded.

Answer 1

That can be:

• Inset individual faces
• Add a subdivision of 3
• Shade smooth

Once done, keeping the insets selected, you can sharpen the inner faces using crease:

Answer 2

Here's an approach which considers the die to be a clamped sphere, and implements that with Geometry Nodes:

The interface provides settings for the radius of the underlying round cube, its resolution, and the XYZ planes against which it is clamped.

The result is quite tweakable. Shown here with a Subdivision Surface modifier, outside the GN group, as an option.

Answer 3

I like Mine de Sel's method:

Create a cube, subdivide 5 or more, put the Smoothness at 1, select the 6 faces like this:

Right click > LoopTools > Flatten:

Right click > LoopTools > Circle:

Enable Individual Origins pivot point and scale up:

Invert the selection and scale up:

Invert again, inset:

Give it a Subdivision Surface modifier:

Answer 4

Interesting challenge. I just modelled it in around 20 mins, it's not perfect but close, started with circles, duplicated them six times, arranged them into a six sided shape with vertex snapping turned on so they could be arranged perfectly in relation to neighbouring vertices (leaving the curved edges between each circle blank), bridge filled the edges, selected each circle face separately and scaled each face down to 0.95 in XYZ, on the now filled curved faces I selected all the edge rings (so all of the edges connecting the edges of all the circles) then subdivided with 3 cuts with smoothing set to 1, smooth shaded all making sure all normals were recalculated as outside:

Answer 5

I believe your complaint is that the original, cubical faces aren't flat. C-C subdivision makes flat subdivisions only when the subdivided face is planar with all of its neighbors. And bevel doesn't make co-planar neighbors without using custom bevels.   Let's skip the bevel and do simple subdivision modelling. We'll use the concept of "control loops" to control the curvature of the edges. Add two loop cuts in our three axes, give it a couple levels of subdivision, and smooth shade:

Let's tweak it in shapekeys to find the exact shape we want. Loop slide the interior loops to the original cube's edges, and it hardens; we can determine exactly how hard we want by controlling the shapekey:

What if we slide back the corner verts toward the center? We'll still have flat faces, but we'll accentuate the curvature of the corners: