Curve

Within Edit Curve command, you have the ability to:

• Change the type of segments.
• Modify the location of control points.
• Add or delete control points.
• Add or insert new segments.
• Delete segments.
• Edit segment type-specific options.

Select Edit, Curve. Decide which of the above modifications you need to apply to the selected curve. Use the commands found within the Edit Curve panel to perform your curve modification.

The Entity Type frame provides feedback about what type of entity is currently selected for modification. It uses a Connector (), Database (), and Source () icon to indicate the entity type of the curve being edited. Only the selected entity segment or a newly added segment of the same entity type may be edited.

The Segment Type frame indicates the current segment type selected as well as other segment types into which the current curve can be converted (if possible). More details on the segment types can be found in the Draw Curves section.

Below the Segment Type frame, we present the standard options to explicitly specify the location of the points defining the curve being edited:

• XYZ: Enter the XYZ coordinates of the control points defining the curve being edited.
• Snap to Points: If checked on, this option allows you to specify the points defining the curve by picking any selectable point directly on the Display window. Snapping is taking place when a bullseye cursor is displayed ().
• Slope Guides: This option allows you to ensure that the curve being edited is tangent/orthogonal to an existing curve or normal to a database surface. With the option checked on, and with any control point of the curve being edited shared with another existent curve, slope guides tangent and orthogonal to the existent curve at the shared point's location will be shown in the Display window. Moreover, if the existent curve is constrained to a database surface, an additional guide normal to the surface at the shared point's location will also be shown. The guides are color-coded broken lines (see image below). To further understand how to use this feature with different types of curves, please review the 2 Point Curves and Draw Curves sections.
  In the image below, we show a linear curve being edited. Since this curve shares one of its two control points with an existent database-constrained curve, the color-coded Slope Guides are shown in the Display window.
  A linear curve being edited (yellow) shares its first control point with an existent database-constrained curve (green). The image shows the different types of slope guides available in this case and their color-coding scheme.
   

  Caution: Note that source curves do not provide slope information. This means that, when editing a curve (connector, database, or source), Slope Guides will not be shown at the location of any control point shared with an existent source curve.

The Points frame contains three unique commands related to control point location and removal:

• Restore: Sets a selected modified control point back to it original location when it was last selected.
• Delete: Removes the last added or selected control points from the current segment. See the Deleting Control Points section for more details.
• Delete All Interior: Automatically removes all interior control points.

All other Point Placement commands are already described in detail in the Point Placement section.

The command in the Segments frame are used to specifically add, insert, or delete segments for the selected curve.

• Add: Provides a control for adding a new segment to the beginning or ending of the selected segment. The default location for adding a segment is the beginning of the selected segment, which is denoted in yellow by a square control point enclosed in a circle. To add a new segment to the end of the selected segment, simply move the cursor past the end of the segment. An arrow, highlighted in pink, should appear at the end of the segment to show the direction and vector of the current cursor position.
• Insert: Provides a control for inserting a new segment at the beginning of the currently selected segment. This command is most useful for cases in which a different segment type needs to be inserted within a curve.
• Delete: Provides a control for deleting any or all of the segments in the curve being edited. Once Delete is clicked, the currently selected segment will be deleted from memory and the next segment in the curve will be highlighted.
• Current Segment: Uses left and right arrow buttons as controls for cycling through the segments in the curve being edited. Once a segment is highlighted, any of the commands in the Edit Curve panel can be used to modify or delete the segment.

For more on Curves, choose a topic below: