heyas; nyar, the one on the left is a flat planar projection. that's the 'before' image. the one on the right is after you spread the edge facets. i don't know what you mean about the automatic algorithm, have you read the edge spreading tutorial? that explains it better than i can. you can adjust how far into the mesh the spreading affects. for example, instead of just spreading the edge vertices, they sorta drag a number of neighbors along with them, to varying degrees.