Tech Sunday - PatternCAD - Curved Lines

Today we are exploring drawing curved lines, or drawing a line the way you want it to appear.  From the Home screen, under the Design & Create heading, tap on Pattern.  On the right side of PatternCAD you will want to select Line under the Pattern | Draw feature.  Then select the Node Spacing button.  

The smaller the number in the Node Space field the closer the nodes will be to each other.  I tend to work at 4 or 5.  Much larger then that and I tend to not get my lines as smooth as I want them.  I drew the hook in the above screenshot with my mouse and have not done any editing on it.

There are three more buttons on this screen that we have not discussed.  Remove last will remove the last Node you drew.  Undo Remove, will restore the Node you just deleted.   Continuous Lines is for when you are drawing a design and you want what you are drawing to connect.  It is an awesome tool and we will use it a future lesson when we start doing design work in PatternCAD.

If you do not see the red Node circles, you will need to turn on Nodes on the top left of PatternCAD.

Now we are going to go into Pattern | Edit.  Tap on Select and then Select All.  Your drawing should now have solid red node circles.  The nodes that are solid red are what will be effected when you do your editing.  For instance, if I want to smooth the entire line that I drew I would now tap smooth.

I can do this as many times as I want to get the effect I desire.  But what if I don't want the entire pattern edited.  I don't want the hump on the left edited.  Then I will use my stylus or mouse to tap and draw a pink box around the area that I want excluded.  

If the nodes are selected this will deselect the nodes.  If none of my nodes were selected, to begin with, it would select only the nodes that are inside the box. 

In this case the nodes were selected to begin with so you can see the area that was deselected.  If I wanted that areas to be the only area selected I could tap the Select Inverse button and it would then look like the screen shot below.

If I tap the Select All button and the tap on Simplify it will remove unneeded Nodes.

I can also Unselect all and then draw my pink box around just the very last node in the center of the hook.  Then if I tap and draw it will make the space between the last node and the node before it longer.

To really understand what an action will do, you need to play with the feature.  By playing with the edit feature now, you will have the basics that you will need to understand it when we go on to drawing our own designs and editing them.

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This post was first published at www.ThreadWaggle.com.