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French curve – Template made from metal, wood or plastic composed of segments of smooth curves; Lesbian rule – Flexible strip of lead for use in molding; Technical drawing tool – Tools and instruments used for accurate and precise manual drafting; Spline (mathematics) – piecewise polynomial curves that smoothly interpolate points
A French curve is a template usually made from metal, wood or plastic composed of many different curved segments. It is used in manual drafting and in fashion design to draw smooth curves of varying radii. The curve is placed on the drawing material, and a pencil, knife or other
Two methods of drawing smooth curves in manual drafting are the use of French curves and flat splines (flexible curves). A French curve is a drawing aid with many different smoothly-varying radiused curves on it; the manual drafter can fit the French curve to some known reference points and draw a smooth curved line between them.
Splines are popular curves in these subfields because of the simplicity of their construction, their ease and accuracy of evaluation, and their capacity to approximate complex shapes through curve fitting and interactive curve design. The term spline comes from the flexible spline devices used by shipbuilders and draftsmen to draw smooth shapes.
The equivalent of a ruler for drawing or reproducing a smooth curve, where it takes the form of a rigid template, is known as a French curve. A flexible device that can be bent to the desired shape is known as a flat spline, or (in its more modern incarnation) a flexible curve. Historically, a flexible lead rule used by masons that could be ...
NURBS curves and surfaces are generalizations of both B-splines and Bézier curves and surfaces, the primary difference being the weighting of the control points, which makes NURBS curves rational. ( Non-rational , aka simple , B-splines are a special case/subset of rational B-splines, where each control point is a regular non-homogenous ...
As ship design evolved from craft to science, designers learned various ways to produce long curves on a flat surface. Generating and drawing such curves became a part of ship lofting; "lofting" means drawing full-sized patterns, so-called because it was often done in large, lightly constructed mezzanines or lofts above the factory floor.
This is a list of Wikipedia articles about curves used in different fields: mathematics (including geometry, statistics, and applied mathematics), ...