How to Use Curves in Blender (Tutorial)

in this blender tutorial i'm going to show you how to use curves in blender so i'm first just going to select everything and then i will delete it i'll now press shift a and you can see that right under here under mesh there are these curve options now there are a bunch of them here but the main ones that i use are the bezier circle and path so i'm just going to start by adding this first one here which is a bezier so what are curves used for well curves actually have many different uses but the main uses that i can think of and things that i've used them for are for things like hair so if you're creating like a stylized character they can be really good to create hair and they're also really good for creating pipes and tubes and like metal piping and things like that now curves don't act like regular mesh objects you can see here if you tab into edit mode or just go over here to edit mode they only have an edit mode and an object mode now when you tab into edit mode you can see that there is this curve and then there are these two handles here and so what you can do is you can click and select these handles and then you can press g to grab r to rotate or s to scale just like a regular object and you can start to bend this curve or this path now this bezier curve it starts with just like a little bit of a curve if i just tab back into object mode and press shift a you can see that there is also a circle so if i add this in i can move it over and then tab into edit mode and you can see that this one it's basically exactly the same as this except that it is a circle instead of just a curve but it's the same thing so you can select these handles and move them around r to rotate g to grab or s to scale and then let me show you the last one so shift a and then you can go right over here to path and this one is basically just a straight one so if i tap in edit mode you can see that it is straight um but this one acts a little bit differently because you can see when i start to pull these it tries to keep it very smooth and so you can use these little dots here to pull it around but it tries to stay as smooth as it can so you can see that the actual path is just that smooth part right there now there are a lot of different curves um there are some other curves here like for instance a rectangle and you can see that this rectangle it actually has some visible mesh whereas on these ones they don't have visible mesh on default now you can add visible mesh to them but right now if you were to render them they would just be transparent you wouldn't be able to see anything whereas this one it acts a little bit differently so you can see that there are curves there are handles here you can rotate them if i just go seven for top view you can see i can rotate this scale it grab it and do some pretty cool things and i can just add some other ones so for instance i can add this ellipse here and you can see what this one is pretty much the same thing but it is just an ellipse instead of a square now you can add these ones and play around with them i really don't use most of these the main ones that i use are path circle or bezier so those are the main ones that i'm going to go over but all the different settings here apply to the other curves as well so i'm just going to delete these and just use the three main ones that you're probably going to be using all right so these curves are cool but let's say you want to make like some stylized hair strands or maybe you want to make some piping or something like that if you go into rendered mode or you try to render this you're not actually going to be able to see anything because this doesn't have any visible mesh so what you can do when you have it selected is you can go right down here to the curve settings so if you want to give these actual geometry what you're going to do is you're going to go to the geometry tab and then you're going to open up this bevel right here and then there is this depth value and if you turn this depth value up now you can see this actually looks like a piping or a hair strand or a tube or something like that and if you render this you're actually going to be able to see it now if you look closely you can see that there is a certain amount of resolution because you can see that it looks a little bit sharp right here so if you turn this resolution up you can see it's going to be higher and higher detail so if you want to be more detailed more geometry you can turn this resolution up and that's going to be very smooth now there's also this fill cap so if you want this little hole right here if you want that to be filled you can just turn that on and now those two caps the end points those are going to be filled and the same thing works for these other ones here so the path is slightly different you can see how it works um but this one here this is like the most default standard one you can do the same thing so right here on the resolution you can just turn this up and then you can turn this resolution up here and then if you want to fill the caps you can do that as well now you can see this resolution here it makes the roundness of the resolution higher but if it's like turning like this you can see that the resolution right here starts to get a bit low so if you want to turn that up as well what you can do is you can go down here to active spline and then there is this smooth here so if you want to turn this off and have like flat shading you could do that or you could turn this on if you want to be smooth shading but what you can do is you can turn up the resolution u and you can see that now it's going to be smooth around here whereas the other setting is going to make it smooth around like this now for most things that you're doing you're probably going to want to just have this be a circular shape but there are some things you can do to actually change the shape of this so you can see right here there is a fill mode you can change this to back and you can see that now it's only going to show geometry on the back of those curves you could also change this to a front and that's going to be the opposite so it's only going to show on the front there's also a half and that is just going to be half of it but for most things that i do i like to leave this at full so that it's a circle and you can also create your own custom shape for your curves but i'll go over that in a moment so now i want to show you probably the most important thing which is just how to move these and create them to the shape that you want so as i said you can press g to grab r to rotate and s to scale um but that is just on the center of the handle but the handle actually has three parts now on the path you can see the handle just has one part because this is using a different curve type but this one right over here this is the bezier this one you can see it has some handles here so you can drag them in or out and you can see that this is going to define the shape differently so if you want that to be just like a really small curve you can just turn this way down and then also with these handles you can press e to extrude and it's going to extrude out a handle so just like if you were editing a normal object and you want to extrude something out you can press e and extrude that out you can also press shift d if you want to duplicate it and you can see now that it's duplicated and then just like using a regular mesh if you select two of them you can press f and that's going to fill it and then if you want to fill this all together you can press e to extrude e to extrude r to rotate you can also hold down the ctrl key and click and that's going to extrude out as well and then you can shift select these and press f and that's going to fill them together now if you want to subdivide them and add a curve in between them what you can do is you can just select all of them or just select the ones that you want to subdivide and then you can just right click and you can see that the context menu comes up and you can see that there are a bunch of different things here i'm just going to show you the main ones that you're probably going to use you can see that there is this sub divide so when you click on that you can see that now it's subdivided it and it's added another curve in between now i actually use the right click select so what i do is i just hit w to make the context menu come up and then i can click on subdivide and you can see because i had everything selected it subdivided it and added more curves in between every curve so now it's very detailed now over here on this geometry there is also this offset and extrude now this offset i don't really use this very much basically it just offsets it from the actual curve so the curve stays the same but the mesh is actually just offset and there's also this extrude here so if you want to make it like really thick you can see i need to kind of rotate this because there are a few places if i just scale this whole thing up there are a few places where it's kind of like cutting through and that's because i subdivided it so much let me just press x and then i'm just going to delete some of these but you can see that now i've turned that extrude up so if you were creating something and you want to give it a look like this where it's very long up and down or on the side you could do that as well i'm just going to turn the extrude back to zero because in this case i don't really want to use it now if you want to change the size of the different pieces you can do that as well so to change the size you press alt s and you can see alt s you can drag up and then click and then like if you want to make this part really thin alt s scale it down and then click you can also just change the size by going to the depth here and then just underneath bevel the depth that's going to make the entire thing bigger smaller but if you want to customize each handle you can just press alt s and then that will make it bigger or smaller so you can see that now this part's bigger and then it gets smaller as it goes down now if you just select all the handles and then make the object context menu come up you can see that there is also this set handle type and you can also just press v to get to that so let's just press a v and i'm just going to go over the main ones that you're probably going to use i'm going to first do automatic so you can see this one is pretty much the same you can just play around with these and change them they're pretty much the same as the default ones i'm going to press v again there is this vector one so because it's vector it's going to make it very very straight so there are straight points but you can still change these so if you want to just pull them around then you can do that and they're not going to be super straight but if you want to leave these they'll be super straight and then the next one is this aligned one and i believe this one is the default one the one that you start with you can see pretty much just the standard thing and then there is also this free one and this free one what it does is it makes these handles so they don't move each other so if you just want to like change this you can see it does make kind of a sharp edge here but in some cases you might want to do that now if you want to separate some curves into a different object you can do that as well so it works just like a normal object would like normal mesh object if you just select the parts that you want to separate you can just press p and then you can just separate that and now if you tab back into object mode select this you can see that it's a separate object and you can tab into the edit mode of that curve all right now this shape here if you want to change the shape on default it's a circle but if you want to change it you can actually do that so right here under bevel the default is round so it's going to be circular so you can just change the depth and the resolution but you can also change it to object and what that's going to do is it's going to use the shape of a different curve so if i just press shift a just make sure in object mode so you can add a new curve shift a and i'm going to just add a circle here let me just bring this circle over here now what you can do is you can select this original one and then the object right here if you click on the eyedropper you can tell it to use the shape of this curve so if i just click on that now you can see it pretty much looks the same although it is bigger but you can see if you scale this it's going to change the shape and i'm just going to rotate this over so you can see it a little bit better so if we tab into edit mode we can start to change this and you can see it's actually going to change the shape of the curve so along the entire curve it's using the shape of this so this object is basically like a profile object so if you want to make like one of those figure eight kind of things something like that you can see it's changing the shape so that is super cool so if you want a custom shape you can do that and it's very easy to do and this is really great if you're creating like stylized hair in blender maybe you have like a character and you want to make some stylized hair this is super easy to do you can just create a hair shape and it can work quite well and is super easy to use so that is the object one but there also is this profile one so if you change this to profile and then scroll down you can see it's going to use this curve here to tell it what shape it's going to be so this is pretty easy to use as well you can just click and drag and just start to add these and you can basically see what it's doing so it's taking this shape and it's adding that shape right there so from here to here and then it's mirroring it over so this is really cool you can make some really cool shapes with this all right so this is just a curve object but if you want to change it to a mesh object so that you can like do uv unwrappings that you can do texturing apply textures things like that you can do that so if i tab into object mode you can click right up here on object and then go right down here to convert to now right now it is a curve you could also convert it to a grease pencil if you wanted to but i want to convert it to a mesh so when you do that now if you tab into edit mode you can see that this is like a regular mesh object and it has vertices and you can like alt select loop so if you want to add seams you could add like textures like maybe you are creating some like sci-fi tubing or something you could add some grungy textures or things like that whatever you want to do this is now just a regular mesh object alright so that is it that is the basics of how to use curves in blender i hope this tutorial was helpful and thank you so much for watching if you'd like to help support this channel i'll have links in the description to my gumroad and patreon page but thank you for watching i hope you enjoyed this video and i will see you in a future tutorial

Channel: Ryan King Art

Views: 57,914

Keywords: Ryan King Art, Blender Tutorial, Blender, Ryan King, Art, Tutorial, quick tip, curves, blender, Bézier, bezier, bezier curve

Id: Ve9h7-E8EuM

Length: 12min 50sec (770 seconds)

Published: Sun May 30 2021