Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Bevelling a Curve

A simple, non-extruded curved line on its own will not be visible when rendered in Blender. Things are different, however, when you bevel the curve—that is, use some two-dimensional shape as a cross-section, and the line curve becomes a guide for extruding the shape into the third dimension.

Built-In Bevel
Start with a curve object—any curve will do. Here we use a Bézier curve.

Look in the Curve Context in the Properties window, for the Geometry panel. There you should see two editable fields with the title “Bevel:” above them, one labelled “Depth:” and the other “Resolution:”. Try setting the depth to something like 0.1.

Now your curve is no longer a simple line. It should have a V-shaped cross section, perhaps like a piece of bent angle iron.

Now try increasing the “Resolution:” value, and you should see the V cross section start to smooth out, until at about a resolution of 2 or 3, it looks like a curved half pipe.

Now look further up, in the Shape panel. There should be a popup menu with the title “Fill:” above it; for a 3D curve, by default the item selected is “Half”. Try the “Front” and “Back” items, and you should see that these give you just halves of your half pipe.

Now try “Full”, and your half pipe should now be a complete pipe.

You can also join the ends together by checking the “Cyclic: U” box under the Active Spline panel.

Start and End Bevel Factors: These reduce the extent of the bevel shape, so that instead of extending the full length of the curve, they go from and to the specified fractions of the length. These become more useful when the cross section of the shape is no longer uniform, when you apply a custom taper (below).

Now change the curve to 2D. The Fill options now become “Both”, “Front”, “Back” and “None”, where “Both” is like the “Half” setting for 3D curves. Note there is no equivalent of “Full”. But there is a new feature: if you check the “Cyclic: U” box, it will fill in the entire interior of the curve!

Try this with a Bézier circle or a NURBS circle, and you should get a pancake-like object. For added flavour, give it a nonzero Extrude value, and this will make the shape even thicker.

Custom Bevel
Now we will try using another curve to supply the cross section. Add a Bézier circle shape. into Edit mode. Now, select just the end points of the handles (not the control points themselves). In the Pivot Point menu, select “Individual Origins”. Now cale down to 0.4.

The result should be something close to a square, but with rounded corners.

Go back to your first curve, and find the field titled “Bevel Object:” in the Geometry panel in the Curve Context properties. Click on it, and a popup menu should appear, and you should see the name of the second curve (e.g. ”BezierCircle”). Select that name, and you should see your bevelled curve immediately take on the cross-section of the new curve.

In fact, you may find the bevel object is a bit large; select it and, while still in Object mode, cale it by a factor of 0.1. The result should appear something like this.

Select the second curve again, go into Edit mode, and try messing around with the control points: you should see your changes immediately get reflected in the shape of the bevelled curve. You may find that the orientation of the second curve doesn’t coincide with the orientation of the bevel cross-section. This is easy to fix, because any change you make to the rotation and position of the second curve in object mode will have no effect on its use as a bevel, so you can freely reorient and reposition it to make it easier to match its shape up with the bevel cross section. (Scaling does, however, have an effect.)

Custom Taper
Now try adding a third curve object. (As with custom bevels, only curve objects will work.) Go back to your first curve, find the “Taper Object:” field (it should be next to the “Bevel Object:” field you’ve already used), and select the name of your newly-added curve. The bevelled shape will now most likely squish down in a most peculiar way. Select your third curve, that you are using as a taper, and go into Edit mode. Now try adjust control points, and observe the effect on the bevelled shape: what you should find is that the object-local Y-coordinate of each control point governs the thickness of the bevelled shape at the corresponding position along the shape given by its X-coordinate, while the object-local Z-coordinate doesn’t have any effect.

As with the bevel shape, you can freely rotate and reposition (and this time, even rescale) the taper shape in object mode, and it will have no effect on its taper function: only alterations of the control points in edit mode have an effect.