Creating Free-form Shapes

You've already created geometrical shapes using the Motion Create tool set. In Lesson 1, you created a circle with the Create Circle tool, and in Lesson 5 you used the Circle Mask tool to create a circle-shaped mask. As you've discovered, creating circles and rectangles is pretty easy using the tools from the toolbar. Motion also includes two free-form tools that you can use to create any shape you want.

The free-form tools are the Bezier tool and the BSpline tool. So what do they do? Do you remember trying a connect-the-dots drawing as a child? By drawing a line from one numbered dot to the next, you ended up with the outline of a shape. Sometimes the shapes were simplefor instance, a beach balland sometimes the shapes were much more complicatedfor instance, a dolphin doing a backflip in the moonlight. The more dots you connected, the easier it became to identify the object. Why am I reminiscing about connect-the-dots drawings? Because the free-form tools work in a very similar way.