Drawing Faces

To simplify your work if you only need basic shapes, you can use predefined faces. You can either add a square, triangle or circle by drag & dropping them from the top toolbar or, from a right-click in the work area, you can also add regular polygons with 5 to 10 sides.

Custom faces

To draw a custom face, you first need to enable the Draw tool from the toolbar or with [CTRL/Cmd + F].

To start drawing a shape, click where you want to place your first point on the canvas. To add more points, you have 2 choices:

• Simply click again where you want to place new points, and this will add points with no handles and create straight lines;
• Or click & drag when you add a point, and this will add a mirrored tangent to your new point. This way, you'll create a Bézier curve and you'll be able to adjust your curved path with handles.

When you want to finish a face, simply click on the first point or hit Enter to close your path, or hit Escape to close the path and exit the Draw mode at the same time.

All paths have to be closed, so they need to have a minimum of 3 points (and 1 Center +!), but there is no maximum limit. In addition, you can totally mix straight segments and curves in the same face!

Editing faces

Manipulating faces

Basic manipulation operations and transformations of shapes are described in a dedicated article.

Moving points

You will notice that there is no difference between custom polygons and predefined shapes. Every dot is independent and can be placed as you wish. You can select the points of your shapes independently by simply clicking on them or using a lasso selection. Just like when you select faces, they will turn yellow.

Then, you can move or delete vertices easily. You can even move corners from different shapes at the same time! 

Note: faces also have one distinct point, that cannot be deleted and isn't on their outline: the Center +. Its behavior is detailed in a dedicated tutorial.

Adding points

You can also add points to existing faces. To do so:

1. Turn the Edit Tool on by selecting it in the toolbar, using [Ctrl/Cmd + E] or double-clicking on a face. 
2. Select the face you want to add points to. You will see white dots appear in the middle of its segments.
3. Simply click on a middle point to add it to the face. You can also directly add a vertex with mirrored handles if you double-click on the middle point.
4. When you're done editing your faces, simply turn off the Edit tool with Escape or the shortcut, or by deselecting it in the toolbar.

Note: when the Edit mode is on, you can still manipulate all shapes (move or delete faces, points, handles etc).

Adjusting handles

As we've showed before, you can mix straight points and curves in the same face when you draw. Curve points each have two handles that you can adjust and that define the curve of the path. You can also edit the type of points afterwards, and with even more choices. Indeed, there are 4 types of points in total:

•  Straight point: it's the default point when you click with the draw tool. It's a simple point with no handles. The path between two straight points is a straight line.
•  Mirrored handles: it's the default handle type when you add a curve point by clicking and dragging with the draw tool. Both handles on each side of the point are the same size and they form a line, they are at the same angle. When you adjust the size or orientation of one handle, the other one will mirror it.
•  Asymmetrical handles: both handles on each side of the point form a line, they are at the same angle but they don't have to be the same length. When you adjust the size or orientation of one handle, the other one will mirror the angle, but not the distance.
•  Disconnected handles: both handles on each side of the point are completely independent. When adjust the size or orientation of one handle, the other one will not be affected. This means you can even have a handle on one side and none on the other side!

There are a few ways to edit the handle type on a point:

• First, know that you can convert a point from Straight to Mirrored (and vice versa) by simply double-clicking on it. Quick and easy!
• To access the 4 types of handles, you can use the handle selector from the properties panel on the left of the interface. It appears when you have a point selected.

Note: know that when you delete only one handle from a point on a curve, it automatically sets the point type to Disconnected.

Once you have set the type of handles for a point, you can easily adjust them. As shown in the GIF above, when you click on a point, its handles appear and you can grab and move the handle control points. When a handle is selected it turns yellow.