Sweet Home 3D Icon    Drawing polylines and curves
 

To draw polylines and curves, you must first choose Plan > Create polylines menu item or select the Create polylines tool.

Polyline Creation mode tool Create polylines tool

You may create a new polyline by clicking in the plan at the start point of the new polyline, then at each point of the polyline until you double-click at its end point or press Escape key. If the final double-click is located on the start point, the path of the polyline is closed, resulting in the creation of a polygon. If you press Ctrl key (or alt key under Mac OS X) while drawing the first segment, a curve will be created if the polyline counts at leat 3 points.
Polylines and curves appear only in the plan and have no representation in the 3D view.

Drawing polylines
Various polylines, curves and polygons

To end the drawing of polylines, choose Plan > Select or select the Select tool (or an other tool).

Select tool Select tool

To help you draw polylines precisely, use tooltips and zoom in. If you press the enter key when the plan has the focus, the values displayed in the tooltip will become editable to let you enter with the keyboard the length and the angle of the current segment (if you didn't indicate the first point of the polyline yet, the tooltip will display the coordinates of that point). Use the up arrow, down arrow or tab keys to edit an other value and press again the enter key to confirm the values you entered. If you want to use again the mouse to draw the polyline, simply move it over the plan.

The angle of the drawn segment is by default a multiple of 15°. You may cancel this magnetism in the preferences pane or while drawing, by holding down the Alt key under Windows, the cmd key under Mac OS X or the Shift + Alt keys under Linux.

As shown by the last shape in the the image above, the curve of a polyline is computed in such a way that if you create a closed square of 4 points, the resulting curve will be a circle.

Once a polyline is created, you may change its location, its color and its style. You may also change a polyline to a curve afterwards with its modification pane.

Choose Plan > Zoom in or Plan > Zoom out to change the plan scale, or roll the mouse wheel forward or backward while keeping the ctrl key pressed (or under Mac OS X, the cmd key pressed).

While Create polylines tool is selected, some tools and menus are disabled. If you need these tools, select the Select tool again.