Tutorial on mixing straight lines and curves in 2D shape drawing?

Support Modeling
1

I’m brand new to Blender and my previous recent experience of 3D software is SketchUp.

Is there a tutorial on mixing straight lines and curves in 2D shape drawing?

I’m finding the Blender Manual 2.78 fairly hard going.

I have made a 2D shape which is currently all straight lines and right angles (see blender file).
I want to replace a couple of the right angles with curves, some of which start at a vertex and some continue from a straight line.

(Later I want to sweep this cross section 360 degrees round the z axis to make a 3D shape, make it solid, and export it as an STL file. I’m presuming I can do all this in Blender.)

Attachments

eyelet-2.blend (403 KB)

2

You can use vertex bevel to make an angle curved - Seelct vertex, Shift+Ctrl+B to bevel and use settings in toolshlf
You can spin the shape using a screw modifier https://www.blender.org/manual/modeling/modifiers/generate/screw.html
Before doing this though you will have to delete the object face (X) as you only want to spin edges

Also before doing anything ensure you first remove the double verices from your object (select all vertices and W / Remove Doubles), position the object origin at the center of the grid and apply the object rotation it has (Ctrl+A / apply rotation) as that will mess up the spin

3

Thanks for that (I was away a bit and notify by email didn’t seem to work), sorry to be slow getting back.

I have got as far as making my shape, removing the face and removing duplicates (see file). Next steps tonight.

Attachments

eyelet-3.blend (403 KB)

4

I switched to Object Mode, did “Tools->Set Origin->Origin to 3D cursor”, switched back to Edit Mode (funny, the object origin marker seems to spring back to the centre of gravity of the object, but it doesn’t seem to affect the spin), view from the top and did “Tools->Spin” with Steps = say 50 and Angle = 360. Removed doubles again. And there you are (see file). I exported it to STL. Thanks for your help.

By the way, I was a little surprised that (CTRL-SHIFT-B) on a single vertex of a 2D shape doesn’t actually do any bevelling. All it does is put new vertices into the edge leading up to the vertex. However it was easy enough to shift these vertices around by hand.

Attachments

eyelet-4.blend (478 KB)