Hey guys, it's Aaron!
Last week, we did a video on drawing filigree and we talked a lot about the
bezier curve extension from SketchUp. So, it's kind of an extension, kind of native tool, it's kind of
somewhere in between, it's from the SketchUp team. We just used it in its most basic
method, which is just a couple of clicks and two points to define an arc.
Real good for creating you know half circle-y shapes that aren't perfectly a chunk
of a circle, like you would with the arc command. But when you start bezier curve, there's this
thing called degree down in the lower-left corner, the lower-right corner, excuse me, and I
just want to dive into what that is. So, last week we had a long workflow video, this week
gives me a little more focus on just how that one piece of the command works, so without any further
ado let's talk about bezier curve and degree. Okay, so I have just... I have these
lines, just to use as a reference they're just a bunch of gray lines in a
group so I can't, I can you know, I can use these as reference but I'm not going to
actually create any geometry. I'm going to come in here to draw click bezier curves, when I
first click bezier curve, you see down low right, it says degree 3. I don't know what degree means
specifically, how that term came up, but what that means is once I pick the start point, I'm going
to click three more points to define the curve. So, here let's just walk right through, right now,
so I'm gonna start, this is click number zero, now I'm gonna click three times to find this curve. One, to define the end; two, is going to define the curve coming off of the start point. So, this is why I have this grid here to use as the same; and then click number three is
the line to define the curve off of the endpoint and click right here. So, this is what that degree
changes, it's how many clicks you have to define this curve. So, no matter what I draw, no matter
how big or small or how many curves, this is always going to be a 20 segment line. That's what bezier curve does, 20 segments. But, changing that degree lets you change how many control points
basically you use when you create this. So, let me show you something just a way to make a
minor adjustment. I'm going to bump that degree up by one, so I'm going to go to draw bezier curves,
before I click anything, I'm going to type in 4 and now I'm going to come in and click my
point 0 and I'm going to click my end for 1 and now it's going to say same thing curve coming
off here for two, now look at the second point, now I'm connected to both. So, I'm going to come
right here to the middle of this point and snap, and now I'm going to come down here and
snap for number four. So, you can see, it seems like that would give you the same thing
but by putting that middle control point in there it actually gave this curve and this curve a
second point to kind of pivot and stretch off of. So, it looked like it would give you something
very similar because this point actually crosses right at the middle line, so does this but you
can see that the curve balloons up a little bit because you had that extra control point here.
All right, let's take that just a little bit further even. Let's come in here and draw bezier
curve and this time I'm going to bump it up to five. All right so I'm going to click number zero,
one then go back to the beginning two, three, four, five. So, look at that look how much that
drastically changed that curve from the beginning. Again all three of these, if I was to
draw one line right across the middle you can see that every single one of them
intersects at the middle of that line, each one, but because of the number of control points
the number of points that pull at that line, I get a drastically different curve on each one
of these, and that's just by changing that degree value when I go in to define the lines,
the points that create that bezier curve. Okay, so like I said this was a brief one,
this is longer what we could do in a quick win, to show it at that detail and then hopefully help
you understand how that works, but I felt like I still had to cover because it was actually kind
of like an aha moment when I went in and started playing with that I'm like, oh that's pretty
cool. I've used the bezier command for years and always limited myself to three clicks and
now I know that I can get a lot more control in defining those arcs just by increasing
that degree, giving me more points to click, to create that kind of curve.
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