HOW TO MAKE A GRILL GRATE PATTERN USING THE ALIGN AND DISTRIBUTE MENU IN INKSCAPE

foreign for how I would make a barbecue grill grate I've had several people ask how to do that so I'm going to give an example here of how I would do it I'm going to use it for a good opportunity to discuss the Align and distribute menu and the different functions there because I'll rely heavily on the aligner distribute menu to lay out the grill pattern for the barbecue grate okay so starting out I'm going to draw a square here and before I lay out the actual Grille I'm going to go ahead and discuss these align and distribute functions that I'm going to use First so I'm gonna draw another Square here I'll change the color make it red so you can see what's going on here okay so now this small object I'm going to say is this is going to be my object it's the first item I've selected here in your align and distribute menu you have last selected first selected biggest object smallest object page drawing selection area I always use last selected you could use first selected you could use biggest and smallest object if you wanted or one of these other options I prefer last selected that's what I've always used so that's what I'm going to do here for the purposes discussion so I have mine set on last selected so that means when I select an item or multiple items the last item I select becomes the Anchor Point for the Align and distribute function so I've selected this red square if I select hold shift and select the blue square the blue square now becomes the anchor so the first one here is a line right edges of the object to the left edge of the anchor so if I click that it does exactly what it says it aligned the right right edge of my object to the left edge of the anchor the next item is align left edges it align the left edges then you can align it vertically then you can align the right edges then you can align the left edge of the object to the right edge of the anchor then you come down here to this row I don't use these here these are for font come down here to this row align the bottom edges of the object to the top edge of the anchor here you align the top edges here you align it horizontally here you align the bottom edges and here you align the top edge of the object to the bottom edge of the anchor so those are all pretty self-explanatory they do exactly what they say but play around with them get comfortable with them the next two that I use on a lot of designs are this even horizontal gaps and even vertical gaps but those are for when you have three objects or more to even the gaps between them and you'll see that when I actually lay out the grill pattern so I just wanted to discuss that so I don't get sidetracked later on the line and distribute different functions here the main things I'm going to use to lay out this drill pattern are going to be the rectangle tool the node tool of course the selection tool the Align and distribute menu and my snapping tool I'll have turned on when you come over here and click on this Arrow this will open up and show you your options in the snapping tool the main thing I'm relying on here is lining to the corners of objects and snapping to paths but you can turn those off and on and play with them they'll give you different results you'll find some of them useful some of them annoying but they all have their purpose so I'm going to lay out the grill grate the person I talked to wanted a 22 and three quarter so I've just drawn a generic rectangle here my ratio is unlocked I'll come here to the width set that to 22 and three quarters and then the height they wanted 14 inches so I'll set that to 14 inches and that will be the body of our grill grate so I'm going to change that to Black then I'm going to come over here and I'm going to draw another Square this I'll change the color to red so we can see what's going on here um now they're going to want or I'm going to lay out four rows across and 22 rows down so I'm going to leave a half inch border all the way around and quarter inch gaps between the slots figuring that up that'll give me five and a quarter wide slots so five two five and the height on them will be 302 thousands that should give us 22 slots high with 21 spaces between them okay so this will be the size of the slots we're going to cut out in this grill grate and we're going to leave a half inch border all the way around it quarter inch gaps between here and 302 000 gaps between the slots as well as the slots are 302 thousands High so then I'm going to get my Square tool again I'm going to hold Ctrl this time click and drag cross across here to the right that's going to give me a symmetrical Square now I'm going to lock my ratio and I'm going to set that square to half inch because that's the Border I want all the way around it now I'm going to click on this Square bring it down here and let it snap to the corner of this Square that's where the snapping tool comes in handy so that's snapped to the corner then I'm going to grab my first slot here and snap it to the bottom corner of this that gives me a half inch this way and a half inch this way I'm going to go ahead and duplicate this Square by hitting Ctrl D or you could go edit duplicate and I'll come over here and snap it to this corner now I will duplicate this by hitting Ctrl d or like I say edit duplicate and I'll drag one over here just let it snap wherever I'm gonna hit Ctrl D drag one over here hit Ctrl D drag one over here and that gives me my four slots across oh wait a minute actually I'm going to go back I want to round the ends of these slots I don't want these squared off slots I think it'll look better with rounded ends so while this is still an object I have not converted this to a path if I click on this with my node tool it'll give me this little node here in the top right corner if I click on that and drag it all the way down as far as it'll go that will perfectly round the ends of these slots so I forgot to do that but I've gone back now we're rounding the ends of the slots now I will control d duplicate these and bring them over and I'll go four of these three Ctrl D and four so now I've made four of those now this one here I can bring it over and snap to the corner of that even though I've rounded the ends of these slots as you can see when I click on it it still will snap to the the corner that should be there before I convert it to a path after you convert it to a path it won't but these are not converted to a path yet these are still rectangle objects so this one snapped to that corner and this one snapped to that corner now if I select all four of them I can use this even horizontal gaps and that will space them all perfectly even all the way across now I will select them all or I'll select the first three sorry and then I will hold shift and select this one just in case I got those out of line vertically I will select this and that will make sure they're centered horizontally and I selected the one on the left last because I know that one is snapped to the corner of that square so there's my first row I'm going to select all of these I'm gonna go object group because I don't want to have to do this four times now I'm going to start repeating these down to make our rows vertically so I'm going to go Ctrl d pull it down Ctrl D pull it down Ctrl D pull it down Ctrl D pull it down that give me five of them now I'm going to select all of those Ctrl D and I'll pull those down that gives me 10 now I can go again Ctrl d that should give me 20. and don't like say don't worry about the spacing at this point it's more about just getting the amount we want and that should give me two I'm gonna hit Ctrl d so there I should have 22 yep 22 objects of type group now I'm going to grab this Square hit Ctrl d I will duplicate and pull it down and snap it to this bottom corner now I can grab this one and pull it down and snap it to the corner of that square I just put there that's maintaining my half inch border all the way around now I can basically get rid of these squares so I'm going to go ahead and do that just select them and delete now I can drag a box around all these excluding the outside outline and if I come here even vertical gaps click that once as you can see that laid out my barbecue slot Arrangement right there perfectly those are all evenly spaced if you were unsure about the alignment vertically maybe you got one out you can hold shift unclick the top one then click it again that now makes that the last one selected and then you could hit your vertical alignment one more time just to be sure nothing got moved off to the side once you're sure everything's aligned we have to ungroup these before we can make them a path so we'll go object ungroup now you have 88 rectangles here there's no groups now you can go path Union now I have my barbecue grate pattern so now I will drag a box around the entire thing I'll make sure once again it's aligned vertically and horizontally and then one last thing before I make this one path if I'm making this for myself I want these Corners rounded off so they're not sharp Corners so I'll come back once again to my node tool click on this there's that little node on the top right I pull that down and with this one you can go pretty drastic but I will just pull it down a little to give it a nice little rounded Edge there now the final thing to do here would be grab the selection tool select both items by dragging the Box around them I'll come here path difference and there's my barbecue grate so that's how I would go about laying out a barbecue grill grate pattern like this um it would be similar if you were laying out a circular one but I'll cover that in a different video because you know once you've got your pattern laid out then you have to make your round border and it'd be a little different I'll discuss in another video anyway I hope that helps some people out hopefully I gave a good explanation of the Align and distribute menu and how that can be utilized these are all very useful tools when you want something perfectly laid out in a pattern I hope that helps some people out thank you for watching foreign

Channel: Bad Dog Metalworks

Views: 1,534

Keywords: #baddogmetalworks, #inkscapetutorialforcncplasmacutting, #inkscapetutorialforcncplasmacuttingmachine, #inkscapetutorialforcncplasmacuttingand, #inkscapetutorialforcncplasmacuttingandengraving, bad dog metal works, cncplasma, inkscapetutorials, dxfdesigns, svgdesigns, ink scape for cnc, how to make a grill grate in inkscape, grillgrate for plasma, designing

Id: QEDxpsP4pKo

Length: 12min 51sec (771 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 13 2023