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. So, hopefully, you like that,
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