Rounded corners

[Carbonflux]

I admit I am mistaken in this case, I should have considered this more carefully, clearly there are no edges one atom thick in nature without scifi nanotechnology involved - now that this has come up I do wonder if there is a way to leverage normal maps or bump maps to address this, fex maybe UV mapping a bolt or the edge of a manhole cover and apply a bump/normal map that specifically deals with areas around selected edges.

[ingenious]

Here's a modo 601 demo video of what they call "rounded edge shader":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwsomsvF99Y

Is everybody absolutely certain that is doesn't actually modify the geometry on the fly? It would be easier to tell if there were some shadows from a point light source cast from a "rounded" object. Can anyone, who has mental ray or modo, try it out? Would be interesting to see how the shadows of rounded objects look like.