PLEASE NOTE:
- There are no beads or links in most pictures below. Instead, you see the shape guide.
- Front and back have separate bend, curve, and point controls.
- There's no requirement to use front as front and back as back. Use them reversed if that gives you other shapes you want. I've even seen Beadrez used "sideways" (so sides become front/back and vice-versa: starting with a bracelet setting plus negative bends was the idea). But, rezzing always starts at the front tip, and it could be tricky if you want beads to look centered or symmetrical about a different point.
Above: starting from a circle with width = 10, sizef = 5, and sizeb = 5, I increased width to 15 and then increased sizef to 10.
The bendf and bendb values set the amount of vertical drop at the front and back tips of the necklace, as a fraction of the horizontal extent. For example, if sizef is 10cm, then a bendf value of 1.0 will add a 10cm downward bend (multiply the two numbers). These values were used for the next picture.
The next picture also shows the effect of curvef, which influences the shape of the bend.
Above: front bend factor (bendf, here 1.0) controls extent of vertical drop, while curvef changes bend shape (pictured curvef values are 0.8, 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 4.0). From a side view, curvef=1.0 results in a straight front piece.
To keep things simple, I focused on the front shape, but the necklace may look nicer if you also work on the back shape, as in this picture:
Above: the back also has bend and curve settings
A shear value adds a straight downward shear to the front.
Although you can already get a straight downward effect with curvef=1, shear will let you combine straight and curved effects for more shapes, For example, you may want most of the front to curve smoothly like curvef=2, but with an added bit of sharp bend at the top, and you can do that by combining shear and bendf. The second-to-left shape in the picture below shows this.
The picture also show the effect of a soften value, which smooths out the sharp bend at the top, but doesn't change the necklace near the tip unless it has a large value (close to 1). A small soften value can be used to just affect one or two beads to un-sharpen a bend just a little.
Above: Front shapes focusing on shear and soften instead of bend and curve. Only the second shape uses bend at all. From left to right: Shear-only (shear=1, bendf=0); mixed shear and bend (shear=0.5, bend=0.5); soften=0.25 on shear=1 shape; soften=0.5 on shear=1; and soften=0.9 on shear=1
Note the leftmost shape in the picture above has a front just like the second shape in the earlier picture, but it has been generated differently: shear was set to 1 and bendf was set to 0, the reverse of the earlier case.
Also note how a large soften value made the necklace more pointy in this example. And, although soften only affects the front part of the necklace, it also interacts with the back part: when you change the back shape and soften is above 0, the front shape also changes due to the softening.
UPDATE: There are 5 different soften modes, specified with the softtype command by number 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4.
1 is the default and is smoother than 0. Change to 0 for compatibility with old Beadrez notecards.
2, 3, and 4 are variations of 1. You'll have to experiment because their behavior interacts with the back parameters and there's no simple rule for what to use :)
The next picture show two necklace shapes made from combinations front bend, back bend, soften, and shear.
Above: more shapes (do you know that you can click the pictures and read the values?)
Both the front and back of the necklace can be made pointy, for example, for hanging pendants or to better fit an AV. There are also two different types of point.
Point1f and Point2f can be used to make the necklace front pointier and are illustrated below. They may look similar at first glance, but point1f makes sharper straighter features while point2f preserves some roundness, especially at the top (where the width bar is). If you load the two images below into two different tabs or windows, and then flip back and forth, the difference will be clearer (it's also much clearer in 3D, for those who have Beadrez).
Above: point1f values (-0.5, 0.0, 0.5, 1.0, 1.5).
Above: point2f values (-0.5, 0.25, 0.5, 1.0, 1.5). Point2f gives more rounded features. In this picture, this is most noticeable at the sides of the width guide. The 0-value shape is not shown, but would give the same shape as second-to-left in the previous image.
Another type of point: Another type of pointed shape can be made by manually removing beads from the center (tip) of a necklace and bringing the two sides together so they meet at a new pointed tip. In some cases, this will give a more realistic point. It may take some extra planning or clean-up at the back of the necklace.
Beadrez 4 added bump settings, illustrated below. The easiest way to understand what they are doing is to start with a flat necklace shape (like the circle at the start of this post), increase bumphi to a very noticeable level, and then adjust bumpstart and bumpend back and forth to see what they are doing. For smaller bump sizes, it can be more difficult to predict the precise effect, so I rez something small like the pearls below to get a better understanding of the shape.
Above: A bump or dip added to the shape. The image shows negative (left) and positive (right) values of the bumphi parameter that sets bump height in cm. The bump can be moved to other parts of the necklace using bumpstart and bumpend values to specify a range.
Above: More shapes. Can you guess the values? Maybe if you enlarge the picture.
