Explanation: Stroke to path - Break Apart - Union

so the question I'm most commonly asked on this channel is what exactly is happening when I do the sequence path object to path and then path break apart and then paths Union it's a technique that I use frequently in a lot of my design work and I've been asked this question a lot of times and it's hard to to really explain it in a comment when you're writing it out in text so I decided to make a video to explain this because I think I could better illustrate it that way okay so I put together just an abstract example of why I use this technique right here and I'm going to come back to this in a minute but first I just want to show you what exactly happens when we use that sequence so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to draw a square okay I'm going to draw a square right here and by the way this is not going to be in place of a tutorial video I will be posting a tutorial video later today I just wanted to create this video and explain explain this technique for everybody that's been asking so as you can see right here I have a square okay now let's turn the stroke on and you'll see it now has a red stroke okay now I'm going to go to fill and I'm going to turn that off and then I'm going to go over here to where it says edit paths by nodes and look at the three points I have right here I have this point I can't really do much with this in the way of changing the shape I have these two nodes right here that let me play with it and then I have this one right here that lets me round the corners because it's registered in Inkscape right now as a rectangle and square it's not registered as an actual object so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go to path object to path and watch what happens to these nodes right here when I do that I'm going to go to path object to path and look what happened I now have these four corners that I can manipulate and play with because Inkscape is no longer recognizing it as a square it's recognizing it as a vector object now as it stands right now this is not actually an object this is actually a stroke if you go to the filled tab you'll see there's no color here because there's no fill color but if you go to the stroke paint tab you'll see it's red because this is a red stroke now there's not much I can do I mean there's more I could do than previously but there's not much I could do in the way of manipulating this any further now watch what happens when I convert this to a path I'm going to go to path pay attention to these four nodes right here I'm going to go to path and stroke the path and watch what happens as you can see it gave me all of these new nodes that I could play with so converting that stroke into a path made this object more dynamic I can now do more with this okay now here's the thing this the only this is the only object right here is this is just an outline I want to fill that in I want that to be a solid square so how would I go about doing that well let me drop the opacity in half to further illustrate what's going to happen next I'm going to break this apart now in order to fill this in so in order to fill this entire thing in I'm going to go to path break apart and look what happened it created two separate pieces out of that negative space so what I could do now is I could have this selected I could either just take this and delete it or I can have both of these selected and I can go to path Union and what was originally a Blue Square going inside of here is now a bigger Red Square going outside of that original Blue Square at equally distant proportions so let me put this in some context in order to in order for you to get a better understanding I created this example shape right here as you can see this is a we'll just call this a snowman this is a snowman and it has an outline around it it has a border going around it but the outline is not touching the Snowman there is some space between the Snowman and the outline as you can see here there's some space between the Snowman and the outline so how would I go about recreating this concepts right here well let's let's give it a try I can do now is I'm going to create a circle let's make this blue turn the stroke off I'm going to create a circle I'm going to create another circle make that slightly bigger I'm going to create another circle make that one slightly bigger and I'm going to space them out equally and I'm going to unify them now let's say I want to give this thing okay so we have the Snowman now and let's say I want to give this thing an outline similar to what you see here I can go to the stroke paint tab and turn that on but look what happens the outline is not there's no space between the outline and the Snowman not only that but it disfigured the shape of the Snowman as you can see it's not nicely it's not nicely shaped as it was before this seems to be thinner and the lines aren't very clean so what I can do actually is I can duplicate this and I could turn that red and I can drop that below there and then I could turn the stroke on and as you can see the Snowman remains a nice shape like this and there's now an outline around this object but the thing is there's no space between this outline and the Snowman so how do we go about creating the space between the Snowman and the outline well this is where we use the stroke to path to break apart Union technique that I always use so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go to I'm going to turn the nodes on just to show you what happens as you can see here this is still obviously a stroke so I'm going to go to path stroke the path that's going to turn that into a more dynamic object that I can further manipulate and then but here's the thing it's just an outline now I want this to be filled in solid so what I do now is I go to path break apart and as you can see it broke it apart into two pieces now with them both selected I'm going to go to paths Union and as you can see now we now have two solid objects where one is larger than the other in equally proportioned proportions if that makes any sense so what I'm going to do now is but but as you can see that the outline is still touching the Snowman so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to duplicate this and create another stroke and I'm going to and now that this is now that I converted this from from a stroke to a path I can use this red snowman as the reference point for the next outline which will give me that white space that I'm looking for so I'm going to duplicate this I'm going to turn this black I'm going to drop that to the bottom I'm going to turn the stroke on I'm just going to make that a black stroke and as you can see we now have something that we can use as the white space as the blank space between the Snowman and the outline so let's take that new stroke we just created and I'm going to go to path stroke the path and then I'm going to go to path break apart path Union just like I did before and then I'm going to take this blue shape right here I mean the red shape and then I'll hold shift and click on the black one and go to path difference and as you can see I'm going to bring the opacity up and color this thing in now as you can see we've now recreated that shape there is a snowman and there is an outline going around the snowmen with some space but with some space between it so that's why I use that technique and if you've seen a lot of my work and a lot of my tutorials I use that technique often because I very often like to put a spaced outline around something so hopefully that offers some clarity as to why it is I use that technique so if you have any questions just let me know and thank you again for watching and I'll see you a little a little later today when I create my next tutorial

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 108,051

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Id: JEPd-gCW5m8

Length: 8min 31sec (511 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 24 2015