The BEST bezier curve tutorial for new Blender users.

bezier curves are fundamental to Modern Graphics professionals work and blender has a robust implementation of them that is similar to how Adobe Illustrator at its curves but it also has some very different conventions that can be perplexing if you just try and dive in and learn blender in blender control points and handles can be adjusted in different ways to change how the curve bends and flows and blender helps by color coding handles to visually differentiate functionality so when we open up a new file the first thing that I want to note is I'm using the light theme because bezier curves show up much better in this mode than the standard Black theme so just in case you know we're going to come up to preferences I have blender light and we're going to come down to add-ons there are a couple of built-in add-ons that we want to enable by default so if you just type in curve add curve curve tools and add curve extra objects both of these are necessary for what we're about to do don't turn anything else on I'm going to have us remove everything and the first thing that you want to do when you work with bezier curves is be aware that blender considers bezier curves either to be 2D or to be 3D and we're going to switch into the top view and I'm going to turn off perspective so that we're essentially looking down on a combination of the X and Y axis so that is critical to understand what we're going to do next is we're going to come down to Curves and we're going to implement a bezier curve which is the very first option and I'm going to do a view frame selected so there it is there is our basic entry point into editing curves when we insert a bezier curve object into blender if we come down to the object data properties for the bezier curve there's a 2d form and a 3D form and we want to jump over into 2D form because we've created the bezier curve in its defaults form it's created it so it's flat to the plane that is created by the X and the y-axis so that's very important to understand bezier curves can be 3D but some functions are not available inside of a three-dimensional bezier curves in blender handles are colorized according to function automatic Vector aligned free and one called toggle-free aligned so we're going to look at automatic first off let's press the Tab Key and come in and look at this you can see right off the bat that we see colorization by default it's put in what we call Aligned curves if we press the V key we're going to have this menu come up that's going to give us these five options so the first thing that I want to do is I want to say my my desire is to create kind of a hockey puck shape that comes up sort of like an L form laying down on its side so what I want to do is I want to extrude another segment up over here so I'm going to select this what we want to know right off the bat is the fact that we're going to be primarily inside of the move tool and blender also has a somewhat newer curved pen tool that we're going to look at a little bit Downstream but we're primarily going to be learning in blender's original bezier curve editing system because that is where it's going to be best to understand these different handle types and functionality with this selected what I'm going to do is I'm going to come up to control points and we're going to do an extrude curve and move which is the E key so we're going to move that up and I'm just going to put that right there if I come over here and Marquee around these two points press the V key and that is automatic and watch what happens when we do that so automatic is assigned to the color yellow for the handles and when you are working with handles a handle can be either an active handle or it can be the passive handle the sibling handle of the one that's currently selected and that just simply becomes a darker version of the active form so we have yellow and like a darker yellow orange if you want to think about it that way but from a functionality standpoint automatic tries to take those selected points and create the smoothest flowing curve between them possible now in order to understand this a little bit before we move on to the next one what I'm going to do is I'm going to undo and I'm going to take us back to sort of this little bit more original form and demonstrate another aspect of automatic so I'm going to select this handle all by itself press the E key e key again and we're just going to create that really messy looking bezier curve and then I'm going to Marquee around these points hold the shift key to select those and again V key and we're going to invoke automatic and we can see that it's going to try and smooth those out for us but a key feature of automatic is that in order to maintain this smooth flowing curvature it's going to automatically adjust other Downstream segments in order to do that so if I come over here and grab this and move it you can see a bit of flowing happening in this neighboring curve right there so that's something to be aware of when you're using automatic automatic can also change sort of the angle and flow of the handles it's the most free form of the handle form so what I'm going to do is let's let's sort of back ourselves up get back to this original form we're going to take these back to automatic all by themselves so let's move in and the next thing that we're going to look at is the option of vector and Vector has its own coloration what does Vector do Vector simply is another way of saying a straight line so when we come over here and I select this notice now I've clicked once on that main control point and we're going to click a second time on that control handle and this is one of the key things that you want to be aware of in blender's original point is that every element needs to be clicked on before it can be operated on so I'm going to come over here and press the V key now and we're going to change this one into the vector format and watch what happens it's now made this a straight line all it's doing is it's taking this handle and it's pointing it at the previous control point but note if I come over and I Marquee around these points and then I simply move them that line is not remaining straight it's still curved and that is because we haven't come over to this handle and made that Vector also so V key and then we're going to make that Vector so now that line is now straight so that is what Vector does so if we press the V key the next item down the list is aligned we want this straight line to come up and then smoothly curve into the L shape I'm going to click on that handle bring up the V key and we're going to come down and change this to aligned and notice that it changes into a handle that creates that smooth flowing curve out of that straight segment up to that point so aligned is pink okay so let's just sort of examine this for a minute if I take this handle right here so we've got pink on one side which is a line this side is Vector so it's green and I move this note what happens it's constantly keeping this a straight line because of the assignment of those functions to each handle so it's very very useful the cool thing about it is if I come over here and I've got this segment and I move it it's it doesn't matter how I try and move my mouse in terms of freeform movement it's going to maintain that aligned relationship to its siblings function okay so let's move that back down and let's take a look at this handle up here I press the V key now we can see that the next item down is free and I'm going to assign that and it turns it red free can be thought of as a corner point if you want to think about it in terms of Adobe Illustrator terminology now if I come down and select this item and move it it forms a corner Point that's all that that does so we can come over and grab this and move it and it is free form but the other thing to remember about free form is that the free form can mimic the other types so for instance if I come down here and I select this and I press V and I turn that to free the curve itself has not changed at all so any form can be turned into free and until you move that point it will mimic the exact curvature that you had before we want to come in now and we want to start working with this and modifying this into a more complex form so I'm going to come up here and select this item so remember with the default editing you click on something and then you will operate on it press the E key and I'm going to pull that right there and then press the E key again and we're going to pull that up now I'd like to maybe change the curve in such a way that this end point is actually right here if you look at that little orange dot that's the object's origin I'd like to move the entire curve over so it actually moves this end to be at that location so if we come over to the little menu that pops out here you could also press the N key if you come down to edit these options right here are one of the add-ons that we enabled so I'm going to come down to where it says sanitize and it said set origin to spline start and when I do that it's pop that up here well for some reason it considers this to be the start so what I want to do is I actually want to select this endpoint and if you come down to utilities just scroll up there's an option that says set first point sets that to the first point now we can just come back up and say set origin to spline start and there we go so I'm going to leave edit mode go into object mode and now if we come back up to item I can simply come up to location press 0 and it will move the whole curve over to that position I'm going to press the Tab Key again to come back into edit mode and here it's going to be a good example once again where we can select all of these press the V key and just to reform this into something that's visibly more ordered we can go to automatic I want to come over and I want to get this point so it's right at 0 along the x-axis on the green line so I'm going to take this I'm going to move it up there but I'm just eyeballing that when you select a single point you have control points that you can numerically control so I'm going to set this to zero and that will put that on precisely now what I can do is I can come to this point and realize that I want to make a straight segment coming from here to here so I'm going to hold the shift key and add this point to it now because I'm in the move tool editing mode I can Marquee across both of those points press the V key and set those to Vector to create that straight segment between those two points but now we've got a break it's automatically converted this handle into the free form which gives us an obvious clear angle right there so the next thing you do is Select that press the V key and then convert that into aligned so that's typically the procedure you handle one that you want to be a vector and then you come over and you change the other into aligned so when we come down here if we start forming this this is in the automatic form and you can see how it it changes that handle to try and make the smoothest flowing curve that it possibly can so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to specifically take this and convert it over into a line and when I do that then those handles don't change they remain exactly the way they are so we're going to come back to this area in just a little while but what we want to do now is we want to create sort of a t form that comes down to the bottom so what I'm going to do is I'm going to come over here to this initial start Point select that and I'm just going to move it over so it's all right about there hold option shift I'm going to move the screen up and then I'm going to press the E key to extrude that down but I'd like it to go specifically just along the y-axis so I'm going to press the y key and I'm going to drop it about right there so we're going to come up here select this handle which we can move freely but again we can do this precisely by taking that into a vector form to get that perfectly aligned okay there we go now let's turn our attention down to this point what I'd like to do is make a perfect circular form to come down and intersect with the green line so we need to relocate the 3D cursor to that location so press shift and S and out down at the bottom is cursor to selected this is one of the most common functions you're going to end up invoking and the 3D cursor moves there to that location but we really want that cursor's location along the x-axis to be at zero so if we come over to the view menu we can come down to 3D cursor where it says location and simply type in a zero and it moves that to that location okay so now we're going to press shift and a and we're going to insert a bezier circle at that location in fact I'm just going to scale it down a little bit for demonstration purposes by default it has created the handle types to the automatic and let's see what the implications of that are we only want one quarter of this section to be matched up right here so if we come over to our object data properties if we come down to active spline one of the options is called cyclic that's essentially a way of saying make this a closed spline so what should happens if I turn that off it really deforms the curve this is the nature of this automatic type is it can change surrounding segments and you don't want that to happen so I'm going to undo press the V key and we're just going to change all of these to well we could change it to a line a line would do the same thing let's now turn off cyclic and we don't get that Interruption of our form we need to get one of the quadrants rotated into alignment here so we're going to press the r key and we can begin to rotate this I'm going to hold the control key now and you can see it's going to snap that to 5 degree rotation segments click and then release the control key so I don't need this handle so I'm going to press the X key and remove that vertex in fact I don't need this one either so I'm going to press the X key and remove that also let's Zoom down a little bit more closely if I come over here and select both of those we see that the pivot point is at the center of that selection but we need to scale from where the 3D cursor is so this is where we would press the period key and we need that pivot to go to the 3D cursors location now if I press the S key it'll scale from that location and I can match them up but I'm eyeballing it and I would really not like to eyeball it I would really like it to be precise so what I'm going to do is have this come up to snapping and we need to enable vertex snapping so by default it's going to be closest and it's only going to affect movement so if I press the S key and begin moving I'm not snapping so the first thing that I need to do is I need to tell the snapping system what element it is of the selected elements that I'm wanting to snap so I'm going to hold the shift key click on this to deselect it continue holding shift key and then re-enable it and note that these are white elements and these are like an orange color they're both selected but the white is the actively selected elements but from a snapping standpoint it's only using the actual bezier point not the handle points so what we need to do is we need to come up and reconfigure it slightly so that it's being affected with the active selected element that's what it's using for snapping we also wanted to use scaling okay so let's do this again s key begin moving over and there we go we snap there we go so that got that in I'm going to turn snapping off because it'll interrupt this if we don't if we leave it on now we've got a couple of segments inside of our bezier curve container if you want to think about it that way we need to join them together because this is independent and I don't want it to be independent what we need to do is I need to take this control point now if you have overlapping control points blender handles this really nicely if you click another time it'll cycle through to the other overlapped point click it again and it'll go back to the point that we now want to select so all I'm going to do is press the X key and I'm going to remove that this would allow me then to Marquee across those two points and then when we come up to control points there's that make segment function and that will connect them with the Connecting Point now it's a single path okay so uh I would come in here now and press the V key and let's make this Vector now the reason I would go about that even though it hasn't changed anything is because when we come to the point where we want to tessellate this form into actual polygons having two Vector handles like that means it's going to tessellate this much more efficiently so the next thing that we want to do is let's come up to the top and let's look at this point we've got a hard sharp corner right there so we're going to bring up the context menu and we're going to invoke fill it and by it's going to put a default value in there which is going to be too big so let's put in a value of 2 which will make that let's put in three there we go now it's maintained the assignments the behavioral assignments to each of the handles which is what we want but if I deselect them you can see that oh in fact this looks a little bit too flat so I'm going to select these now when you've marquised around the bezier points the handle points also become selected even if we didn't Marquee around them but now when we come in I can Marquee around just the handle points that I want to work on because they have that aligned function because they're pink I can press the G key which is move and I can move both of those handles at the same time to change that curvature which is nice okay let's say that we want to take this segment up here and increase its size I'm going to select that point press shift and S and we're going to do cursor to selected but again I'm going to take the cursor location and set it to zero so it's going to scale from that point we're going to select these elements and then we're going to press the S key we're going to scale that up that works pretty well okay uh the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to select these two points press shift and S and then we're going to do cursor to select it on those and it'll find essentially the bounding box center press shift and a and we're going to add a bezier circle there it's going to be a little bit large let's just scale that down for demonstration purposes but I want to Anchor this down to this point I want to move the whole circle down there so I'm going to activate the active point that we want to operate from so I'm going to hold the shift key click here click it again it becomes white so it's now the active element I'm going to re-enable vertex snapping we want active so that's correct so now I'm going to come over here and press the G key and I can snap right down there okay now press the S key but if we scale you can see it's going to scale from the position of the 3D cursor and I want it the pivot to be down here at the Active element press the period key again and we're going to go to active element and that will move the pivot down there and I can press the S key I'm going to scale this up so what I want to do is I really just want this round area to conform more to a nice circular form so I'm just going to get it to about right like that okay now I'm going to take this point press the G key and I'm going to move it until it snaps right there now I can come down here press the G key on this and you can see how I can form that pretty closely to our circular template and then on this point I'm going to turn off snapping I don't want any unintentional snapping I can press the G key here and I can move that until it gets a little bit closer okay so that worked pretty well now I'm just going to select this point over here command l or control L if you're on the PC that'll do a select linked this was some simply kind of a template so I'm going to press the X key and delete that there we go so that is how I sort of reformed that segment right there so we have a very well controlled piece of bezier curvature at this point since we've been working on just one half we want to mirror it to the other side if I press the a key the transform pivot point is at the bounding box center of the selected elements and we want it to be at the center of the transform meaning the center of our 3D universe so we can move the 3D cursor to that location so I'm going to press shift and S and we're going to return the cursor to the world origin and then press the period key to take the pivot to 3D cursor okay what we need to do now is we need to come up to curve and add duplicate which is shift d so you can see that but I don't want to move it I want to I want to mirror it so I'm going to press the Escape key and then move the cursor over here s key X and then minus one click there we go so what we need to do now is figure out how to join these two curves into one complete Loop if I command and press the a key you can see that we've got all of these assignments to each of the handles and if you really want to maintain those then you have to be cognizant of how it is that you're going to join two points together so let's take a look at this if we come over to the edit menu we can see that we have right down here in sanitize we've got join neighboring splines let's just see what happens when we invoke this and it says applied one join to two splines so if we come up to the join points up there those are joined when you run that operation it changes all of the handle types to free it hasn't changed the shape at all but if you're wanting to maintain the actual handle types then you don't necessarily want to use join neighboring spline so let's undo back to an original point where we retain those handle types and we have to figure out how to join so let's do this let's come over here to the top the top is a really logical location I'm going to select one of these two points that's overlapping and press the X key we're going to delete that but notice what happens over here is it changed that because of the handle assignment type when it is that Vector type it needs something to point at and it because this isn't joined it doesn't know to look at that point so I'm going to manually set these right now to free and then when I come back up here and press the X key and delete that then this maintains its form then all we have to do is take this point hold the shift key and select this point and we come up to control points and then make a segment and there we go it's join them but it's now creating curvature so I'm going to take that point in fact I'm going to select this and then Marquee around those two points those two handle points press the V key and we're going to set those back to vector and we get that nice angle right there now at the bottom let's look at this so if I press the G key and move that those are just overlapped but they're not joined let's undo and I'm going to press the X key and we're going to delete that vertex so this is where we come over back over here to the object data properties in active spline and we turn on cyclic and it will close that for us creates the same form because the handle types are the same and now we have a closed path well one advantage of this is that it gives us the ability to fill this so let's come back up here and take note that we're in a 2d form because it was created on the X and the Y plane and now we can come to fill mode and I can set this to say front and it fills that for us so that's one of the benefits but let me show you another thing that this can do for us so let's come back into outline mode in fact I'm going to turn off fill so that we're not seeing everything let's select these two points press shift and S do cursor to selected and then we're going to do shift a and we're going to add a circle right there in the middle let's scale this down just a little bit okay since that's in there blender will automatically detect counter space relationship to that curve since it's inside of the other curve so now when we come back over and we turn back on we look at this it will automatically make that a counter space for us which is really nice okay so that is how we carefully constructed this bezier form and what we're going to do next is we're going to take specifically a look at the curved pen tool and how it kind of differs in functionality but complements the original bezier editing functionality so the next thing that we want to do let's press the Tab Key close this object out use the curve pen tool because that's the newer methodology I'm going to press shift and S and return the return the cursor to the world origin and then press shift a and we're going to add just a point as a starting position in fact let me close I'm going to press the N key okay so we come over to the curve pen tool we're in 2D mode which is what we want let's go ahead and close this down the benefit is expediency fewer clicks needed we click hold and drag to create form click hold and drag in one click so I'm going to create a question mark form click hold and drag but it also does something kind of cool if you simply click but not hold and drag it creates vector or linear segments by default so that's pretty cool and then you can kind of Tidy them up a little bit later so now we click hold and drag click hold and drag now I'm holding if I want to move that point hold the space bar and that will allow you to position it while you're still forming the Curve click hold and drag so now I'm just roughly creating the question mark form there we go and now we're going to come over here to active spline and we're going to close that turn off fill so we're not seeing that okay so the same goes with forming I'm going to take this point V we'll take that to automatic and we can come in and form this so if I were to do this using the standard methodology let me come back over here in fact I'm going to press the period key and move the pivot back to the active element just so that that's clear so if I click this if I want to edit the handle then I have to click it and then I have to click a third time on the widget or press G on the keyboard so it's a couple of extra operations whereas if I'm in the curve pen tool click once and then click hold and drag to form click hold and drag click hold and drag click hold and drag click hold and drag so it's fewer clicks that's one of the great benefits of it click hold and drag so all of this I click once and then the handle again is a click hold and drag methodology so down here at the bottom I can click this this is in vector and I want this one right here by clicking that to be in aligned mode and then I click this and change that to vector but this is where you would switch over so I'm going to switch over back to the move tool for doing other types of editing I'm going to select both of those press the S key and then X to only scale along the x-axis 0 we can do the same thing down here s and then y and then 0 and then s x 0 so you can switch back and forth between the methodology at will that's the great thing about it it's very seamless so let me come over here and click hold and drag now let me show you another thing that is a benefit of this tool is the fact that you can come at any point hold the control key down and insert a control point so that's very Adobe like it's the ability to come in and do that and we were missing that behavior in the original methodology so there we go click hold and drag click hold and drag it's just really nice now let me just show you really quick if I type the V key and I take this into automatic this is one of the benefits of the automatic form is the ability to do this just kind of come in and form in a very free form way and then once you want to change that it will automatically change it back into the aligned form so that is a quick look at using the curved pen tool there's still some Nuance in a few places but that's the overall GIF gist of it is a single click hold and drag methodology versus the many clicks of the original way of editing bezier curves

Channel: Christopher 3D

Views: 50,421

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Id: f53GvpTIO2w

Length: 31min 19sec (1879 seconds)

Published: Fri May 12 2023