Cubic Bezier Spline tool in Solvespace

Cubic Bezier Spline tool 

The Cubic Bezier Spline tool in Solvespace can be used to create shapes that are hard or impossible to accomplish with other tools such as straight lines. A Cubic Bezier Spline is a line segment that can be controlled with four points. By changing the position of these points the curve can be manipulated or smoothened.

By clicking with the left mouse button in the graphics window the new control points can be added to the Cubic Bezier Spline tool to a maximum of 12. This is essentially a Composite Bezier Curve or polybezier. The problem with these curves is that it is hard to keep the curve smooth.

Polybezier with eight control points fully constrained approximating a circle

a classic example of shapes that benefit from Cubic Bezier Splines are Vases. Vases also appear to be popular with 3d printers. In the video below I'll demonstrate how to create a Vase in Solvespace using the Cubic Bezier Spline tool.

At the end of the Vase video I’ll demonstrate two often overlooked functions in Solvespace, the Length Ratio constraint and the Length Difference constraint I’ll also show how to apply the Length Ratio constraint to two circles.


The Solvespace Vase file from this tutorial can be downloaded here.

For this tutorial I used Solvespace 2.3 on OSX.

Solvespace is open source (GPLv3 license) and is available for Window, OSX and Linux. It is developed by Jonathan Westhues and maintained by Whitequark and others. It can be downloaded here: http://solvespace.com/download.pl