Confused on curves, need help

[Grace]

Hi & welcome to our forum, @sjoerdg

These 2 posts will explain some of the ways people do curves:

Curves with Formulas

@KeithFromCanada - I’ve copied your post here: Okay. I looked over your work, and I’ve found some issues (mostly to do with your curves) that I also ran into. Based on my (somewhat limited) experience with V, here is what you need to watch out for: Always do curves last. They depend on control/reference points and lines that must be in place before you place your curves. It’s an issue with V itself, which needs to be dealt with at some point. Never do freehand curves. Use formulas for setting …

Another "very mathematical" way of making curves!

The method I’m going to tell about is a part of invented in late USSR EMKO system. It was developed specifically to use with computers so it doesn’t have “use a french curve” instructions and things like that. Isn’t that nice? The main idea is to break down all the curves into arcs with defined center and radius. Here is how I use it in Valentina. [image] That’s what we start with. Н01 and H03 are shoulder points, B11_B21 is the bottom line of the armhole The first thing we do - find points…

But they both involve the very curvy armhole curve and can be applied to the crotch curve at the hip line on the trousers.

I only answer you with: There are no hard & fast rules to creating curves, except that, if you wish to have your pattern to resize smoothly between different sizes/measurement files, you need to use formulas that refer to the corresponding parts of the pattern.

I normally place a straight line from the ankle to the knee on both the inner & outer seam and then do a curve from the knee to the crotch or waist.

Oftern, the pattern making instructions tell you to make the curve 1cm inwards, and what I have found is that they actually want you to make a line from the knee to the hip/crotch. on the inner seam, add a node 2/3 of the line and from this node, add another node 1cm away at right angles to the line from knee to hip. The create your curve touching this point and use the angles and lenghts of these lines in the formulas.

I’m going to add the nodes and do a new curve on your pattern, so that you can see what I do.

z pattern.val (14.0 KB)

Maten 13-11-2021.vit (1.7 KB)

Line that I’ve added are in dark red & new curves are in blue.

Basically, the angle of the curve handle needs to either follow on a line or be at a 90° of another line or curve handle. If the curve is very pronounced, like the crotch, you need to use /2 and if it is a gentle curve, then /3 or more.

I hope that this helps you to understand curves better.