Making a Curved Path

Here’s a useful technique that came up recently at a training session with one of our client firms. It shows how to lay out this paving pattern along a curving path. While normally this type of paving is done with hatches or hardscape objects, a different solution is required here, since the stone pavers have to follow the curves, something not possible with either of those methods.

1. Lay out your path edges. This could be drawn a number of different ways. If you’ve drawn the edge as a series of lines and arcs, use the Compose command so that the curving edge becomes a single polyline. This path is 4’-0” wide and will have 12” X 24” pavers.

2. Double-click on the Offset Tool and set the options as shown here.

3. Click on the polyline to be duplicated, then click again on the side where the duplicate should be created. Repeat this until you have three polylines.

4. Draw a vertical line 12” long. Duplicate the line and move the duplicate X=12”, Y=-12”, so that it appears as shown here. Group the two lines. This group will represent the staggered joints between two rows of stone pavers. Now duplicate the group of staggered lines; you’ll need two groups to complete the task.

5. Select the group and polyline as shown here. Choose Duplicate Along Path from the Edit Menu. Long-time users take note, this is no longer a tool in a palette, in VectorWorks 2008 it’s become a menu command. In the command’s dialog box, match the settings here. The Tangent to path setting is especially important, as this it cause the joint lines to rotate as they are duplicated along the curved path. Click OK to complete the duplicates. Repeat the process for the half of the path.

6. For any joint lines that extend past the end of the path, ungroup and tidy up by deleting lines. The path is complete! To keep all these separate objects together, you should select all of the paving lines and group them.