Bezier Pen tool similar to Illustrator?

Hi,

I was wondering if anyone has ever seen a way in Rhino, with or without a plugin or script, to be able to draw lines similar to the way the Pen tool works in Illustrator?

What I’m looking for is the ability to have a drawing tool that can switch between straight and curved lines without exiting the tool. With the Illustrator pen tool example, you click to add a straight segment and click and drag to make a curved line. See attached image.

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@michael.wolfe.animat
Type “_HandleCurve” (no quotes)

This looks great so far! Thanks Fred!

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Hi,

I would like to readdress the same question. Pen tool in Illustrator is vastly superior than any of the multitude of curve drawing tools in that tool box in Rhino, because it handles a wide variety of techniques in one tool and is editable as you are still drawing. This is my biggest hang-up in Rhino. When I need to trace something very detailed and irregular I have to do it in Illustrator and then bring it over. Luckily Affinity Designer has perfectly cloned Illustrators pen tool, so I don’t have to pay a monthly fee for Illustrator anymore, but Rhino should really clone this tool because it is leaps and bounds better than any of the curve drawing tools in Rhino currently. If anyone has a plug-in for this already, please let me know. It is really the only thing Rhino is missing for me and I wish Illustrator would implement all of the great snapping, rescaling and countless other ingenious commands that Rhino has pioneered.

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The problem is that Illustrator-style curves are totally not suitable, not smooth enough, for manufacturing purposes. I can’t stand drawing in Illustrator myself.

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Have you triedHandle Curve and Handle Editor? How would you change it to work “leaps and bounds better ?”

I would say that Rhino is definitely not exclusively a manufacturing related program. Its implications for art and design, especially with Grasshopper are astounding. I work with CNC milling, routing, lasercutting, 3D printing etc, and definitely have to bounce back to between illustrator bc of the pen tool and some other things in creating offsets that Illustrator handles differently.

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Yes, I am comfortable with the handle curve and handle editor in rhino. The reason Illustrators pen tool is superior is because, one: it creates a continuous line unless you break it on purpose, two: you can change direction and between curves and straight segments without breaking your line, three: you can edit the control handles and control points as you are drawing without breaking the line or exiting the tool by holding control, alt, spacebar, Four: you live preview what the line is going to look like because of rubberband view. So if you can imagine tracing something like a tree or hair where you have thousands of negative spaces and positive overlapping spaces, having to “join” or “crvboolean” thousands of overlapping shapes becomes a daunting task.

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I hate Adobe Illustrator, and all of their three-finger solute modal drawing tools.

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The feature @hunterstabler is talking about is not exclusive to Adobe Illustrator , it’s a standard tool in all design/layout software out there and it is quite better than Rhino handle curve for the things it is design to do, that is illustrating in 2D.

And I’ve gotten paid for hundreds of hours over the years doing nothing more than cleaning up such curves to be acceptable for actually making things, which is still Rhino’s core purpose. The downstream problems that would result from people actually using such a feature in Rhino would be a support disaster.

Well, that’s learning what’s the right tool to use for the task you need to accomplish, but I understand your point.

Adobe Illustrator was developed in a era when books and manuals were used as a means of copy protection. Back then, making a user interface intuitive was a conflict of interest. If so many people wanted to use Adobe Illustrator wrongly that they coded warnings and recommendations for the user, then it was Adobe that was wrong about the user interface decisions they made.

If McNeel wants to develop a better tool than Illustrator’s pen tool, then I’m more than ok with that. The problem is that Rhino’s handle curve is even worse and less intuitive than Illustrator’s one. By the way, Illustrator’ve got a new tool that simplifies enormously the workflow when drawing complex shapes, it’s called the curvature tool

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I am back two years later to readdress the need for a tool like the Pen Tool in Illustrator. I am currently learning Fusion 360, and the line tool in that program is crude compared to the array of curve tools in Rhino3D. The developers in their forums will not listen, so I will again try my luck here. Anyhow, I understand that you can make any sort of line segment in Rhino, and the tangent, blend, arc, interpolate, etc are all incredible tools, but your handle curve tool can not compare and does not compare to Illustrator pen tool, Affinity designer pen tool, Inkscape pen tool, etc. the problem is the starting and stopping is incredibly inefficient in Rhino. It is such a nightmare trying to get geometry back and forth between Rhino and any of the 2D programs so it would be so much better to be able to quickly and efficiently draw organic, complex closed shapes with straight and curved lines directly in Rhino3D. Rhino is the best program ever for most things, but this is a massive hang up and seems like such an easy fix. I know some of you long time Rhino users have tried learning a different 3D program and been disappointed that a certain aspect was much worse than Rhino ( command line, snapping, gumball, arrays, etc). Open yourself to the possibility that another tool from another program might be more efficient and intuitive, and might improve Rhino. I have attached some linework examples of things that are inordinately time consuming to do in Rhino with the current curve tools. I work as a CNC programmer and operator for a furniture shop, and as a college instructor for Rhino3D, Illustrator, Photoshop and for Digital Fabrication specializing in CNC, 3D printing and laser
cutting.


As someone who often has to work with graphics other people create in Illustrator, God no a thousand times no. Illustrator curves are usually garbage that have to be redrawn in Rhino to be fit for purpose. Rhino is made for cutting steel, Illustrator-style curves are not. It would be unleashing a nightmare of support calls and frustrated machinists.

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So wouldn’t it then make more sense to be able to directly create the curves in Rhino according to Rhino’s particular B-spline logic than have to constantly import them with bad geometry into Rhino? I really don’t understand your complaint. If there were a new curve tool that you didn’t like, you could simply not use it, but it might vastly improve workflow for others.

Do you think that can actually be done? It’s doubtful, all the things people like about Illustrator curves seem180 degrees from what makes for proper smooth manufacturable geometry.

You can literally make any type of curve already in Rhino. The problem is a UI problem of having the stop between every single line segment or even portion of a line. I think there is a big issue with closed mindedness about “Rhino is for this purpose only”. I mean I literally work with Rhino all day to make things, but tons of people use it just to model things, some people work with it exclusively in 2D, some people use it as a precusor for rendering and others never render anything. It is a multifaceted tool.

People use Rhino for data visualization, Lidar 3D mapping/machining, Jewelry making, art making, architecture, video game assets. Just look at all the varied plugins from Food4Rhino. It isn’t just a tool for machining smoothly cut metal parts. Frankly parametric programs can be better for that sort of thing.

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