Subtitles of the Movie

We're now going to look at Splines, and what we're going to do is we're going to create some landscaping and a pond for our building that we're gradually building up here. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to utilize all of these AutoCAD points, these little pink spots that you can see all over the drawing. Now they look a little bit small there because I've zoomed out, but because they're set relative to the screen size I can type Regen like so and press Enter and they all resize. So, we've got a pond area here, we've got some landscaping coming round here, and we've also got the outer edge of the landscaping coming round here. Let's do the outer edge first. You'll notice we're on our Landscaping Layer already. We now go to the Spline Command. It's on the Draw Panel here. If I click on the fly-out arrow and I'm going to click on the Pin to pin it open, so that fly-out panel does not go back into the Ribbon, and there's the Spline Command there. It creates a smooth curve that passes through on their specified points. So I click on Spline and like most other Line Commands, like Line and Polyline, it asks for a first point, so I'm going to go here from this corner here. It will show as an end point because it's the corner of the building. I left-click and then, making sure my Node Snap is on, I just click on each of the Node Snaps as I go. So, you'll notice that the curve is following me through these points as I go and click on each one. Now what I'm going to do here, I'm just going to pan outward slightly and make sure that I can get at those points down at the bottom. So, I'm just taking this curve all the way through these points. I'm taking it all the way to here until I get to this point here, which again is an Endpoint Snap on the corner of the building. Now I press Enter to finish and then it prompts me for a Start Tangent. I don't have a Start Tangent in this case because I'm not joining to another curve, so I press Enter. It then prompts me for an End Tangent. Again, I'm not joining to another curve so I just press Enter again and it closes that Spline out for me. So as you can see now, I have my landscaping going around my building. If I zoom in slightly now you'll again notice that the points have got bigger, so I do a Regen again, like so. Make sure you type it correctly unlike me. And what we do, we press Enter there and they resize. It makes life that little bit easier if you set your Point Style to be relative to the screen size because you can then take advantage of that Regen Command. So, again, we click on Spline now and I'm going to utilize the Node Snaps again, just click, click, click,. to., all the way through like so. So what we've got here is perhaps a planting bed at one side of the building. Again, Enter to finish, Enter, Enter for Start and End Tangents. As I come out now you can see those curves are very smooth. Last one now, change Layer to Pond, and what I'm going to do now is take another Spline around these points here. Click on Spline and I'm going to work my way around each Node Snap until I get my outline of my Pond. So I'm going round and round and round, I go back to that point there, click, Enter, and then Enter on the Start Tangent, Enter on the End Tangent, and there is my Spline for my pond. What I'm going to do now is freeze that Points Layer and as you can see it looks much neater and tidier. What I'll also do now is bring back my doors by thawing that Layer out. I'm going to unpin my Draw Panel, and as you can see now I've utilized the Spline Command there to draw the outlines of my landscaping and my pond. Now it may be that I want to break this into an actual Polyline itself. What I can do there is if I just type pe, for Polyline Edit, and now select a Spline, do I want to turn it into one, I can turn it into a Polyline. So I press Yes, specify a precision; I'll leave it at 10, just press Enter for the default there, and then press Enter again to come out of Polyline Edit. That is now a Polyline. So I can convert a Spline to a Polyline just by using the Polyline Edit Command. Also as well, you can convert to either Arcs or Line Segments. So if I actually click on this now you'll see there's lots of grips there and as you can see if I zoom in real close and click on one, and pull it out that way, you can see that that is converted to Lines, which means that my PLine Convert Mode Variable is set to 1. I'll just undo that there, and take that back, but you can see that that is now a Polyline instead of a Spline.