Chapter 5

Shaping Curves

For many years, the AutoCAD® program wasn’t very sophisticated when it came to shaping curves. Sure, you could create circles, arcs, and ellipses, but shaping complex curves wasn’t accurate compared to the capabilities of programs such as Autodesk® Maya® or Autodesk® 3ds Max®. In AutoCAD 2011, all this changed with the introduction of an all-new SPLINE command that offered much more flexibility in shaping true NURBS (nonuniform rational B-spline) curves using fit points or control vertices. AutoCAD 2014 expands on this by giving you the ability to shape curves in any way you can imagine and even use them to model surfaces, which you’ll learn more about in Chapter 17, “Modeling in 3D.”

  • Drawing and editing curved polylines ...

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