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If you’re familiar with applications such as Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, you’ll already be familiar with many of the basic concepts of editing Bézier polylines.
B-Spline Polylines
A B-Spline polyline is similar to a Bézier spline; however, these polylines excel at creating smooth shapes. Instead of using a control point and direction handles for smoothness, the B-Spline polyline uses points without direction handles to define a bounding box for the shape. The smoothness of the polyline is determined by the tension of the point, which can be adjusted as needed.
B-Splines excel at creating smooth curves
Converting Polylines from One Type to Another
Just because you created a shape using a B-Spline or polyline, that doesn’t mean you’re stuck with the controls you started with. You can convert any shape from B-Spline to Bézier, or Bézier to B-Spline,
as needed.
— Right-click a shape in the viewer and choose Convert Bézier Spline to B-Spline or Convert B-Spline to Bézier from the spline’s contextual menu (only the appropriate option will be displayed).
When converting from one type to another, the original shape is preserved. The new polyline generally has twice as many control points as the original shape to ensure the minimum change to the shape. While animation is also preserved, this conversion process will not always yield perfect results. It’s a good idea to review the animation after you convert spline types.