- When it comes to working with splines,
we have a few options for showing and hiding.
Right now, there's not much seen here.
When we click on it we have our control arms,
and our different points, and things like that.
But if I go up to spline tools,
and go to the show options, here,
I can start showing thing like spline handles,
control polygons, inflection points,
minimum radii, and curvature.
These options, one, two, three, four, five,
are available here in our spline tools window.
We've only got four of them,
so we'll have to use the feature to bring them down.
So, I'm going to go ahead and click this spline.
It activates these options.
Now, already we have the spline handles shown,
so we can turn those on and off right there.
I'm going to toggle that back on.
We can show the inflection points.
We can show the minimum radius,
which is that 3.8575 radius over there.
And then, we can also show the curvature comb.
Now, this is a lot of information to see at once.
But, if we want to do something
and have specific relationships
or a specific bend radius, for example,
that we can't exceed because we're modeling
a specific kind of cable or tether.
Or, we want to have a really smooth curvature,
we can use our curvature lines here
to see where the curvature falls
and where the hard drops are.
For example, you know, if I pull this up really steep,
you can see that steep, kind of unnatural change
from the curve right there.
But, I can pull it back down,
and our curvature smooths out nice, nice,
and gets a little bit softer, which is good.
You know, so depending on what you're doing,
you know, the inflection point also shows you where
it changes direction.
Depending on what you're doing,
you'll want to toggle these options on or off.
You're not going to need them all the time,
and if you have a huge sketch
that's filled with all kinds of different splines,
you'll want to do this individually for different splines,
if you can.
But typically, I keep most of these off,
and just keep my handles on
so that I can use them for adjusting my spline
in any other direction.
You can always go back and toggle them back on, if you like.