AD: Converting nodes to sharp - no handles: Solved

[casterle]

AD 1.6.5.135, Win 10. 

After a day playing with the new Blender beta (a program I'd ignored due to it's horrible UI which is vastly improved and very usable), I'm back to AD training.

In this exercise, I'm tracing with the pen tool, roughly tacking down points then going back and cleaning things up. When I need to convert a smooth node to a sharp node, I click on the convert button and the node changes to a square as expected. Cool, but I can't seem to find the node's handles after the conversion. This isn't what was happening in the video - there, handles appeared after conversion.

So the bottom line was that I could always find handles on sharp nodes created with Alt-drag and the Pen Tool but never on ones I'd converted.

After a LOT of dinking around, I discovered that the handles are indeed there, just not visible. It appears that they are created with a length of zero. Here's how to get at them.

Select the Node Tool, then select the node in question. Hover your mouse over the line on either side of the node until the cursor changes as shown:

Then simply drag the line - the handle will appear as the line is moved. Move the other line to see the other handle.

I hope this saves someone a bit of time.