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I am trying to round the corners of a custom shape, but it is just straightening the original curves out.

Note: This is in Illustrator CS5

Here is the shape before the effect:

enter image description here

The 3 "corners should be rounded".

Here is what happens when I use the effect:

enter image description here

How can I preserve the curves, and just round the actual corners?

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  • 1
    You dont the implementation is broken.
    – joojaa
    Jan 20, 2017 at 6:02
  • Hi KevBot, welcome to GDSE and thanks for your question. If you want to know more about the site, please see the help center or ping one of us in the Graphic Design Chat once your reputation is sufficient (20). Keep contributing and enjoy the site!
    – Vincent
    Jan 20, 2017 at 12:42

4 Answers 4

2

I don't have CS5, but this should work:

Select your path. With the pen tool selected, create points on each side of the anchor points, something like the following:

Path with new anchor points added near the original cusp points.

With the white arrow tool selected, click one of the original cusp points (i.e., corner points) and then Shift-click the other two to select all three. Then, click the Convert selected anchor points to smooth icon in the toolbar at the top of the screen (alternatively, with the pen tool selected you can Alt or Option-drag on a corner point to convert it to a smooth point):

Convert selected anchor points to smooth icon

You should end up with something similar to this:

Path with bulging corners.

With the white arrow tool, drag each of the bulging corner points inward until they look appropriate:

Bulging corner points fixed.

Here's the new path overlaying your original shape.

Path with rounded corners.

If you want the corners to be more rounded, make sure the anchor points you added in the first step are farther away from the corner points.

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  • I better keep this approach on my tool belt. Thank you
    – KevBot
    Jan 20, 2017 at 6:15
1

Purely for comparison’s sake, I thought it would be good to show what Adobe Illustrator CC (in this case, I am using v2017) can do:

enter image description here

  1. With the selection tool, select your entire path
  2. On a Mac, hold down COMMAND key (CONTROL on Win).
  3. Click and drag on the corner radius circle icons that appear
  4. You can optionally select a specific point and just round the corner for that part of your shape

Double click one of the circles for corner options:

0

My way is easier if you have good experience with the pen tool.

First, make your triangle. In my case, I just made a box, deleted 1 anchor point, joined the two points creating a segment opposite to the middle point and rotated about 45 degrees (please correct me if I'm wrong).

enter image description here

Next, hit the convert path to rounded corner button. I'm pretty sure this feature is already in CS5. Make sure you have the point selected when doing this.

enter image description here

Do this one by one for each of your points. The one in the middle should be the easiest one to convert. The one at the top and the bottom are a bit tricky but nothing a pen tool can't fix :)

As you go each of the top and the bottom points, with your Direct Selection Tool active, grab the furthest to the left angle for the point being selected and while holding Shift, bring it to the center creating a nice straight side but still rounded corners.

enter image description here

It should look something like this:

enter image description here

Again, do the same thing for the bottom and you will get this:

enter image description here

I hope this helps! Please let me know if I confuse you. I'll be glad to clarify myself some more.

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  • as notice the top and the bottom arc round shape look similar but the middle arc round shape is not similar. All 3 arc round shape must be similar
    – atek
    Jan 20, 2017 at 14:32
  • Can you suggest any solution for this? @atek
    – CheeseCake
    Jan 20, 2017 at 22:52
0

The simple way: Create additional anchor points around cornes (as it was mentioned at first answer), then apply Round Corner effect as usual.

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