How To Use the Shape Builder Tool in Inkscape 1.3

[Music] hello there as you may know already there's a new powerful feature in inscape 1.3 I'm talking about shape Builder 2. that's right there's a dedicated shape Builder tool similar to Adobe Illustrator or Affinity designer so let's test out and learn how to use this new feature here I am in my document as you can see I already draw some shapes and our goal will be to unite them into a cloud before I start let's address the elephant in the room there's a little problem with shape Builder right now let me show you what I mean if I select those shapes like that and use the classic approach so I go to for path and simply unite them all right we make one shape out of those circles all inspection with the node tool we can notice that we got very nicely aligned nodes everything is smooth and nice as it should be alright but if I undo I select them once more and this time I use the shape Builder what is over here shape Builder tool that's this new tool I click on it for a moment everything will like gray out I can see only selected shapes all right and now we got two modes plus and minus mode four adding stuff so we can make a union or for subtracting shapes let's go with plus so we can simply click and drag across those circles and now I need to confirm this operation I finish up and it seems like a very same result at first but on the inspection you see it already we got many totally unnecessary notes Let me just zoom in look at that this supposed to be just Arc from a circle so there will be one note here and one over here everything else on this line is unnecessary node that will make editing this feather more complex okay so this is already known problem it was reported and it will be fixed in version 1.31 so they're going to release a patch that will fix this very very soon so if you are watching this in the future they probably already fixed this issue but if you notice this in your software like today just letting you know they already working to solve that I think they solve it already they just need to release the patch to the public all right so that's the problem right now but that's not the main topic of this video Let's undo this action and finally try out the shape Builder tool so I'm going to select all of those shapes so that's the first thing you need to do to select shapes you want to use for shape building select them all then click a shape Builder from the tool list if you do that your shapes will turn gray everything around will be invisible for a moment and as I mentioned we got two modes plus and minus mode if you start with minus mode you got this pinkish color to remove parts of the shape then with plus mode you can click and hold and show what you want to unite and at the end of the process you need to confirm or deny the changes so if I click ok here's my new shape it's Vector shape I can change the stroke I can fill it with color I can do whatever I want with it all right so that's our first example little cloud let's move to the next one what do we have here if you draw multiple shapes like this and select them all together you can generate a new shape out of it with just one action using this shape Builder tool in the past you need multiple actions but now with shape Builder we can simply select what we need keep in mind shape Builder got all talk clean so he will clean up part of the shape you didn't use for shape building you see the gray area if something is marked with the gray color it will be clean out it will be erased automatically so you don't need to go with minus and erase that so if I click ok the gray areas are gone and I got only this flower shape I need from that grid and speaking of grid shape Builder can be used with lines in that case I just draw lines that are not close shapes just lines if I select all of those lines together and shape Builder as you can see any close area any intersection can be used to build a shape this technique is some sometimes used to build some logos or fancy letters so we can actually create a grid for ourselves to build shapes as we please and then when I click ok the gray areas are clean and I end up with those shapes so shape build the tool is very handy if you're working with some kind of grid that's a nice apply of this tool and here's the another case normally in the past to make this nice infinite symbol we need to do multiple operations we need to pay attention to the layer panel what is above what is below and now we can just simply select all of those shapes and if you go with shape Builder select what you need and as I mentioned the gray areas they will be clean up for you so you don't need to worry about them this Auto cleanup is also existing in Adobe Illustrator it's also in Affinity designer but I think here they showing us visually that all the gray area is here do you want it or we will get rid of it I really like the fact that we can see it before they clean it up for us and I click ok and we got very nice infinity symbol here what next that's our last example let's select all shapes that's we always need to do select all of them shape build the tool and then you can simply move this that's one shape I want and then this will be separate shape take a look at this line between them so we can create multiple shapes in one go you don't need to just unite all of it together we can create multiple shapes oh it was too much what should I do now very simple undo command Z Ctrl Z and try again okay so as you can see we can create multiple shapes on one go I'm still in the same go and the middle it's in gray color it will be clean up automatically so I click ok and take a look how fast it was and of course each element is a separate shape now so I can apply any fill color I want to it everything is separate here so that's really really nice and I think if they can manage to make the path a bit simple because as I mentioned if we inspect the path take a look it's a bit too complex now but the patch is coming and with this fine Edition the shape building will be even easier in inscape you know what's the best way to learn a new tool to practice so go to the description I will post a link to this practice file so you can try to use all of those examples yourself and you can try to make similar or your own freestyle shapes out of them okay so just download the free file and try for yourself we got five examples and you can learn how to use this shape Builder tool by yourself alright thank you for today if you would like to learn more with me keep in mind you can subscribe to see my tutorials every week thank you for today and I will see you next time bye

Channel: Kru Mark Tutorials

Views: 12,719

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Id: iQN78mjNglo

Length: 9min 9sec (549 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 28 2023