# Wrong tangential directions for cubic bezier curve

I am well aware that there are several ways to find the tangents to a Bezier curve. However, I choose to just substitute the result of differentiating the Bezier curve equation.

So, given four control points, ptOne, ptTwo, ptThree and ptFour:

// Differentiate x with respect to t
float dxdt = -3*(1 - t)*(1 - t)*ptOne.x
+ 3*(1 - 4*t + 3*t*t)*ptTwo.x
+ 3*(2*t - 3*t*t)*ptThree.x
+ 3*t*t*ptFour.x;

// Differentiate y with respect to t
float dydt = -3*(1 - t)*(1 - t)*ptOne.y
+ 3*(1 - 4*t + 3*t*t)*ptTwo.y
+ 3*(2*t - 3*t*t)*ptThree.y
+ 3*t*t*ptFour.y;

// Find the tangent, dy/dx
float dydx = dydt * (1/dxdt);

// Find the rotation angle in degrees
float angle = atan(dydx) * 180/M_PI;

The strange thing is that this does not seem to be working for all kinds of curve. For example, if I draw a curve like this, with the first control point being the second leftmost point and then in a clockwise direction:

and attempt to draw the tangents:

You can see that some tangents (in particular, the first two and very last one) are not oriented in the right direction. Why might this be happening? I triple checked my differentiation and can't find anything wrong...

• The problem is the dydx computation, which cannot distinguish between equal and opposite tangents, e.g. $(1,0)$ and $(-1,0)$. You should just use $(dy/dt, dx/dt)$ as the tangent vector and normalize it.
– user106
Nov 3 '18 at 16:32
• OK, I'll give it a shot tomorrow. Thanks for the suggestion! Nov 3 '18 at 16:47
• @Rahul Noting that, sometimes one needs to use the 2nd (or 3rd) derivatives if the 1st derivative vanishes. Nov 5 '18 at 9:55
• @SimonF: If the 1st derivative is zero and the 2nd derivative is not, then the curve has a cusp and the tangent is not defined. Only in the extremely rare case that both the 1st and the 2nd derivatives are zero does one have to use the 3rd derivative to obtain the tangent. (And beyond that in general, the first nonzero higher-order derivative, as long as it is of odd order.)
– user106
Nov 5 '18 at 12:14
• @Rahul It's been a long time since I was on the OpenVG spec group so this is not exactly fresh in my memory, but what of the cubic Bezier curve with control points A, A, B, C? Nov 6 '18 at 8:53