in this blender tutorial, I'm going to show you how to use curves in blender. So, I'm first just going to select everything, and then I will delete it. I'll now press shift A, and you can see that right under here, under mesh, there are these curve options. Now, there are a bunch of them here, but the main ones that I use are the bezier circle and path. So, I'm just going to start by adding this first one here, which is a bezier. So, what are curves used for? Well, curves actually have many different uses, but the main uses that I can think of and things that I've used them for are for things like hair. So, if you're creating a stylized character, they can be really good to create hair, and they're also really good for creating pipes and tubes and metal piping and things like that. Now, curves don't act like regular mesh objects. You can see here, if you tab into edit mode or just go over here to edit mode, they only have an edit mode and an object mode. Now, when you tab

into edit mode. You can see that there is this curve, and then there are these two handles here. And so, what you can do is you can click and select these handles, and then you can press G to grab, R to rotate, or S to scale, just like a regular object. And you can start to bend this curve or this path. Now, this Bezier curve, it starts with just like a little bit of a curve. If I just tab back into object mode and press Shift+A, you can see that there is also a circle. So, if I add this in, I can move it over, and then tab into edit mode. And you can see that this one, it's basically exactly the same as this, except that it is a circle instead of just a curve. But it's the same thing. So, you can select these handles and move them around, R to rotate, G to grab, or S to scale. And then, let me show you the last one. So, Shift+A, and then you can go right over here to path. And this one is basically just a straight one.

so if I tap in edit mode, you can see that it is straight. Um, but this one acts a little bit differently because you can see when I start to pull these, it tries to keep it very smooth. And so you can use these little dots here to pull it around, but it tries to stay as smooth as it can. So you can see that the actual path is just that smooth part right there. Now, there are a lot of different curves. Um, there are some other curves here, like for instance, a rectangle, and you can see that this rectangle, it actually has some visible mesh, whereas on these ones, they don't have visible mesh on default. Now, you can add visible mesh to them, but right now, if you were to render them, they would just be transparent. You wouldn't be able to see anything. Whereas this one, it acts a little bit differently. So you can see that there are curves, there are handles here. You can rotate them. If I just go seven for top view, you can see I can rotate this, scale it, grab it, and do some pretty cool things.

and I can just add some other ones. So, for instance, I can add this ellipse here, and you can see what this one is. Pretty much the same thing, but it is just an ellipse instead of a square. Now, you can add these ones and play around with them. I really don't use most of these. The main ones that I use are path, circle, or bezier. So, those are the main ones that I'm going to go over. But all the different settings here apply to the other curves as well. So, I'm just going to delete these and just use the three main ones that you're probably going to be using. All right, so these curves are cool, but let's say you want to make some stylized hair strands, or maybe you want to make some piping or something like that. If you go into rendered mode, or you try to render this, you're not actually going to be able to see anything because this doesn't have any visible mesh. So, what you can do when you have it selected is you can go right down here to the

curve settings. So, if you want to give these actual geometry, what you're going to do is you're going to go to the geometry tab, and then you're going to open up this bevel right here, and then there is this depth value. And if you turn this depth value up, now you can see this actually looks like piping or a hair strand or a tube or something like that. And if you render this, you're actually going to be able to see it. Now, if you look closely, you can see that there is a certain amount of resolution because you can see that it looks a little bit sharp right here. So, if you turn this resolution up, you can see it's going to be higher and higher detail. So, if you want to be more detailed, more geometry, you can turn this resolution up, and that's going to be very smooth. Now, there's also this fill cap. So, if you want this little hole right here, if you want that to be filled, you can just turn that on. And now, those two caps, the endpoints.

those are going to be filled, and the same thing works for these other ones here. So, the path is slightly different. You can see how it works, um, but this one here, this is like the most default standard one. You can do the same thing. So, right here on the resolution, you can just turn this up, and then you can turn this resolution up here. And then, if you want to fill the caps, you can do that as well. Now, you can see this resolution here. It makes the roundness of the resolution higher, but if it's like turning like this, you can see that the resolution right here starts to get a bit low. So, if you want to turn that up as well, what you can do is you can go down here to active spline, and then there is this smooth here. So, if you want to turn this off and have flat shading, you could do that, or you could turn this on if you want to be smooth shading. But what you can do is you can turn up the resolution U, and you can see that now

It's going to be smooth around here, whereas the other setting is going to make it smooth around like this. Now, for most things that you're doing, you're probably going to want to just have this be a circular shape, but there are some things you can do to actually change the shape of this. So, you can see right here, there is a fill mode. You can change this to back, and you can see that now it's only going to show geometry on the back of those curves. You could also change this to a front, and that's going to be the opposite, so it's only going to show on the front. There's also a half, and that is just going to be half of it. But for most things that I do, I like to leave this at full so that it's a circle. And you can also create your own custom shape for your curves, but I'll go over that in a moment. So now, I want to show you probably the most important thing, which is just how to move these and create them.

to the shape that you want. So, as I said, you can press G to grab, R to rotate, and S to scale. Um, but that is just on the center of the handle. But the handle actually has three parts. Now, on the path, you can see the handle just has one part because this is using a different curve type. But this one right over here, this is the Bezier. This one, you can see it has some handles here, so you can drag them in or out, and you can see that this is going to define the shape differently. So, if you want that to be just like a really small curve, you can just turn this way down. And then also with these handles, you can press E to extrude, and it's going to extrude out a handle. So, just like if you were editing a normal object and you want to extrude something out, you can press E and extrude that out. You can also press Shift D if you want to duplicate it, and you can see now that it's duplicated. And then just like using a regular mesh.

if you select two of them, you can press F, and that's going to fill it. And then, if you want to fill this all together, you can press E to extrude, E to extrude, R to rotate. You can also hold down the Ctrl key and click, and that's going to extrude out as well. And then, you can shift-select these and press F, and that's going to fill them together. Now, if you want to subdivide them and add a curve in between them, what you can do is you can just select all of them or just select the ones that you want to subdivide. And then, you can just right-click, and you can see that the context menu comes up, and you can see that there are a bunch of different things here. I'm just going to show you the main ones that you're probably going to use. You can see that there is this Subdivide. So, when you click on that, you can see that now it's subdivided it, and it's added another curve in between. Now, I actually

use the right-click select. So, what I do is I just hit W to make the context menu come up, and then I can click on subdivide. You can see because I had everything selected, it subdivided it and added more curves in between every curve. So, now it's very detailed. Now, over here on this geometry, there is also this offset and extrude. Now, this offset I don't really use this very much. Basically, it just offsets it from the actual curve, so the curve stays the same, but the mesh is actually just offset. And there's also this extrude here. So, if you want to make it like really thick, you can see I need to kind of rotate this because there are a few places. If I just scale this whole thing up, there are a few places where it's kind of like cutting through, and that's because I subdivided it so much. Let me just press X, and then I'm just going to delete some of these. But you can see that now I've turned that extrude up.

so if you were creating something and you want to give it a look like this where it's very long up and down or on the side, you could do that as well. I'm just going to turn the extrude back to zero because in this case, I don't really want to use it. Now, if you want to change the size of the different pieces, you can do that as well. So to change the size, you press alt s, and you can see alt s, you can drag up and then click, and then like if you want to make this part really thin, alt s, scale it down, and then click. You can also just change the size by going to the depth here and then just underneath bevel the depth. That's going to make the entire thing bigger, smaller, but if you want to customize each handle, you can just press alt s, and then that will make it bigger or smaller. So you can see that now this part's bigger, and then it gets smaller as it goes down. Now if you just select all the handles.

and then make the object context menu come up. You can see that there is also this set handle type, and you can also just press V to get to that. So, let's just press A, V, and I'm just going to go over the main ones that you're probably going to use. I'm going to first do automatic, so you can see this one is pretty much the same. You can just play around with these and change them. They're pretty much the same as the default ones. I'm going to press V again. There is this vector one, so because it's vector, it's going to make it very, very straight. So, there are straight points, but you can still change these. So, if you want to just pull them around, then you can do that, and they're not going to be super straight. But if you want to leave these, they'll be super straight. And then the next one is this aligned one, and I believe this one is the default one, the one that you start with. You can see pretty much just the standard thing, and

then there is also this free one, and this free one. What it does is it makes these handles so they don't move each other. So if you just want to like change this, you can see it does make kind of a sharp edge here, but in some cases, you might want to do that. Now if you want to separate some curves into a different object, you can do that as well. So it works just like a normal object would, like a normal mesh object. If you just select the parts that you want to separate, you can just press P, and then you can just separate that. And now if you tab back into object mode, select this, you can see that it's a separate object. And you can tab into the edit mode of that curve. All right, now this shape here, if you want to change the shape, on default, it's a circle. But if you want to change it, you can actually do that. So right here under bevel, the default is round, so it's going to be circular. So you can just change the depth and the

resolution, but you can also change it to object. And what that's going to do is it's going to use the shape of a different curve. So if I just press Shift + A, just make sure in object mode, so you can add a new curve, Shift + A, and I'm going to just add a circle here. Let me just bring this circle over here. Now what you can do is you can select this original one and then the object right here. If you click on the eyedropper, you can tell it to use the shape of this curve. So if I just click on that, now you can see it pretty much looks the same, although it is bigger. But you can see if you scale this, it's going to change the shape. And I'm just going to rotate this over so you can see it a little bit better. So if we tab into edit mode, we can start to change this, and you can see it's actually going to change the shape of the curve. So along the entire curve, it's using the shape of this. So this object is basically like a

profile object. So, if you want to make like one of those figure-eight kind of things, something like that, you can see it's changing the shape. So, that is super cool. So, if you want a custom shape, you can do that, and it's very easy to do. And this is really great if you're creating stylized hair in Blender. Maybe you have a character, and you want to make some stylized hair. This is super easy to do. You can just create a hair shape, and it can work quite well and is super easy to use. So, that is the object one, but there also is this profile one. So, if you change this to profile and then scroll down, you can see it's going to use this curve here to tell it what shape it's going to be. So, this is pretty easy to use as well. You can just click and drag and just start to add these, and you can basically see what it's doing. So, it's taking this shape and it's adding that shape right there. So, from here to here

and then it's mirroring it over, so this is really cool. You can make some really cool shapes with this. All right, so this is just a curve object, but if you want to change it to a mesh object so that you can do UV unwrappings, that you can do texturing, apply textures, things like that, you can do that. So if I tab into object mode, you can click right up here on object and then go right down here to convert to. Now, right now, it is a curve. You could also convert it to a grease pencil if you wanted to, but I want to convert it to a mesh. So when you do that, now if you tab into edit mode, you can see that this is like a regular mesh object, and it has vertices, and you can alt-select loop. So if you want to add seams, you could add textures, like maybe you are creating some sci-fi tubing or something. You could add some grungy textures or things like that, whatever you want to do. This is now just a

regular mesh object. Alright, so that is it. That is the basics of how to use curves in Blender. I hope this tutorial was helpful, and thank you so much for watching. If you'd like to help support this channel, I'll have links in the description to my Gumroad and Patreon page. But thank you for watching. I hope you enjoyed this video, and I will see you in a future tutorial.

How to Use Curves in Blender (Tutorial)

How to Use Curves in Blender (Tutorial)

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