- Splines are one of the most powerful
and complicated of the sketch entities.
Let me show you how they work.
Right up here under the spline tool,
I can actually click on the dropdown.
I can see there's multiple ways we can create splines.
So we have the spline here.
We have a style spline.
We can also create a spline on a surface
or an equation driven curve,
but right now let's just focus on regular splines
as well as style splines.
So I'm going to choose a regular spline here,
go ahead and choose the front plane.
And I can click where I want to start.
And then again, I can click where I want to end.
And notice that tool stays active.
Now, if you actually hit escape at any point in time,
that will turn that off.
And this turns into what would look like a regular line.
However, it's not.
This is actually a spline.
So you can grab these little controls here,
and you can move those controls around
to create pretty cool shapes all from one straight line.
We also have a direction vector.
I can grab that and I can add the more power or less power
about how much control this direction vector has
over that spline. I can give this same thing over here.
I can change the angle,
and I can control how much it influences that spline.
Now, we don't have to have just two points,
we can have multiple points.
So if we come up here to spline again,
click here, click here, click here, and click here.
You get pretty much exactly the same thing.
They can grab those points.
You can move them around,
and notice each one of those points
has those same little controls.
I can control how much effect that endpoint does have
and can also change that angle very easily.
Same thing with these other points over here.
I can start moving and twisting
and doing all kinds of very interesting things with splines.
In fact, if you click on the spline itself,
you can right click on it
and you can see we have all these other things we can add.
So we can add tangency control.
We can add curvature control and all these other things.
So I definitely take a look through
all these different controls you can add
and use with your spline.
In fact, you can add additional points.
You can remove them and so on.
So there's a lot you can do with a spline.
Now I also want to cover the secondary type of spline.
So let's go ahead and create a spline
which is what's called a style spline.
So a style spline, click again, click over here
click over here and click over here,
and go ahead and hit escape.
Now the style spline is very similar to a regular spline.
But we have these kind of
control construction geometry lines
that are surrounding the spline.
So I can grab the points themselves,
I can drag those points
or I can grab the lines and move those around.
So it makes it really easy to control the spline
and get a nice free flowing shape.
That's a little bit easier to work with
than a regular spline because you have this control
of being able to pull and stuff like that.
You can also get weird shapes
like this little shape over here.
It doesn't flow very nice.
So the style spline is really good for
you know, product design.
When you want a nice flowing curve
from one thing into the next.
And by using these kind of bigger controls
that are attached to these lines,
we can define that a little bit better.
So those are the two different types of splines.
Now I do want to caution you though.
When you're working with splines,
there's no really good way to define the spline itself.
When you go to a drawing or go into manufacturing.
I can't call out a radius or a length, right?
Because it is a free flowing curve,
it makes it really hard to deal with in the real world.
But if you are working with consumer products
and you want something smooth and flowing,
that looks really nice,
definitely use the splines
cause they are very powerful
but just keep in mind that limitation
that it's going to be hard to define that in a drawing format
or if you want to create some type of a CAD file
that's defining exactly the size, location, rotation
and so on.
It's very hard to do that with splines.
So just keep that in mind.
And in fact, another recommendation
that you might want to consider
is actually clicking on a spline itself,
and switching it over to construction geometry,
and then doing what's called a best fit.
So you can choose like a three point curve
and come out here and like snap to that spline
and get really really close to that spline or that shape,
and then maybe use a tangency arc,
and so you can kind of like follow that spline around
and see if you can get a very similar shape
to what it is.
Now what I did right there is
so I've created a bunch of regular arcs
that are using the spline as a reference.
And now each one of those can actually have
a definitive dimension.
So I can say, hey this dimension here and there it is.
I can say this dimension over here.
Same thing at each one of these,
I can define a value for them.
As I go through this
and that's going to make it a little easier to define
this kind of information actually on a drawing.