Inkscape Explained: Path Functions

this is Nick with logos by Nick comm and today I have a new series that I'm going to be introducing to the channel called Inkscape explained where I'm going to go over each individual feature in Inkscape and explain how and why it works to the best of my ability and I'm creating this series by popular demand because many of you have asked me if I could create a video just explaining what all of this does in Inkscape and I think that would be a good idea but to actually create a video explaining every single feature in Inkscape and how it works it would be a video that would be several hours long probably and it would take me a long time to to create that and to plan it out and everything so I decided what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go through each individual feature one by one and create separate videos for it while I have the time and just just so you know this is not going to be in place of my tutorials I'll still be posting two tutorials a week but in addition I'll be posting maybe one or two of these Inkscape explained videos every week depending on how much free time I have to create them so in the first one I'm going to be explaining path functions and by that I mean up here when you go to path all of these I'm going to be explaining what all of these do you know the union difference intersection and look let me get started I'm going to create a circle and then I'll create a square and then I'll create some text I'll just write text just like that and you know what let me open up the the fill and Stroke menu and I'll take the circle I'll make it red I'll bring the opacity down in half I'll take the square I'll make the square blue I'll bring the opacity of that down in half and the text I'll just leave it as it is so let me take this first this circle right here and go to path and the first one is object to path now if I actually click on that you're not going to be able to see what happened there it doesn't doesn't look any different but I'm going to show you what happens let me go back to the circle tool Inkscape recognizes this is a circle you can change you know you can change the radius of the circle and everything like in order for us to have separate nodes on each of these points that we can manipulate further we have to convert that to a path so let me go to path object to path and I'll go to the Edit path by nodes tool and you'll see we have all these different nodes here that we could play with I could take this one and move it out there take this move it there move this one in like that and just to give you an idea just to give you the best pretty much the basis of how that works and to further illustrate how it works I'm going to take the text and let me enlarge this a little bit so as far as Inkscape knows this is just text I mean I can go back to the text tool and I could add more text to it numbers and stuff but in order to have this with separate nodes that I could edit and manipulate individually a lot to convert that to a path so I'll get a path object to path and that's no longer text as far as Inkscape knows I can go to the text tool and I can't add any text or subtract any text to it because it's now a path so let me go back to the Select tool and let me ungroup it because once you convert it to a path Inkscape gives it to you with all of the letters grouped together so you'll have to click ungroup to ungroup each individual letter and then I'll go to the edit pads by nodes tool and let me zoom in and show you you could take each one of these nodes and you can now manipulate this thing however you'd like you can take that node make it rounded if you'd like so that's how that works let me get rid of that what's next path stroke the path okay so let me make a copy of this a stroke is an outline that you could put around an object and let me put an outline around this object I'll go to the stroke paint tab click the blue button to turn it on and it created an outline around that object I'm going to make that outline green like that and under the stroke style tab you can change the thickness of it you can use a give you a one-point stroke this is relative to pixels you could change it to inches millimeters seven centimeters whatever you want let go back to 25 pixels and I'll go back to the edit path by nodes tool and you can see we could edit this the same way we could edit the circle before with the edit pads by nodes tool but what if I want to edit the the stroke even further that outline what if I want instead of just moving the whole side of it like this one if I want to take the left edge of that green stroke and pull that out and then take the right edge of that green stroke and pull that out I'll have to convert that stroke into a path before I can do that so I'll get a path stroke to path and you'll see we now have separate nodes for each side that we can edit just like that so let me undo all that and what's next path trace bitmap okay so this is for raster images let me let me take this and get rid of this let me bring a raster image in here I'm just gonna hit ctrl I to import and I'll click on this wood image I'm just going to bring this wood image into Inkscape this is a raster image a photograph of a piece of wood and what the trace bitmap does is it pretty much traces a vector over a raster image so I'll get a path trace bitmap and it gives you all these different options to use here I like to use color quantization and if you click update it'll show you a preview window everything in that preview window that's black would be what's created a vector out of let me show you click OK as you can see it took that image and it created a black vector object going according to the the piece of wood there and you could edit this just like you would any other vector object any other path in Inkscape you could even go to the Edit paths by nodes tool and edit those pads and those nodes individually let me delete that now let's say we want to invert that actually let's say we want the that white space in there maybe we want that to be the path and we want this black area to be the negative space what we could do is click on this image and we'll go to invert and click update and you'll see it inverted it click OK and there you have it you now have a vector object based on the woodgrain so that's how that works let me get rid of that we're done with this and get out of that menu get rid of that what's next in the list path Union okay so let me take these two objects right here with them both selected I'll go to path Union it took those two objects and it unified them together into a single object with all of these different paths and one color that you could you know that you'd fill in and you know work with it however you'd like okay now let me select those both and go to path difference and when I go to difference it's going to take the object that's on top and use it to punch a hole to the object beneath it since they up since the the Blue Square is on top it's going to take the Blue Square and punch a shape through this red circle the size of that square let me show you path difference just like that so we now have an object with a different shape like that so now if we want to do the opposite let's say we want to take this red circle and punch a shape through the Blue Square what we have to do is take this red circle raise that above the Blue Square and then select them both and go to path difference that's how that works okay so let's see what's next path intersection okay let me select those both and what the intersection tool does it just takes the the area of the two shapes where they intersect and creates an object out of that so we'll just go to path intersection and we now have an object created out of the the intersecting space of those two objects let me select those both and go to path exclusion exclusion works similarly but in Reverse it excludes the intersecting area so I'll click on exclusion and it created an object out of the two objects but with the intersecting space missing and that's negative space in there that's not a that's not a white object let me show you I'll take that and lower that beneath that as you can see that's a negative space in there it's transparent so we get back to what I was doing okay so let's see what's next here I'll select those both will go to path a division what division does is it takes the object on top and creates a separate shape out of the object beneath it out of the intersecting area so I had that that red circle right here I'll select those both go to path division and it creates a separate shape out of it like that and that's not a tool I really use very often I really haven't had a need for it and again it goes relative to what's on top so if we want to do the opposite we'll have to take this square and put that on top of the red circle and then we can go to path division and again we have a separate shape within that circle made out of the blue square so that's how that works let me select both of those and let's go to path cut path not really sure what that does I guess that works similarly oh okay I see yeah really I'm really not sure the cut path does that's really useful it looks like it it takes the two and it works similar to the division one but it doesn't have any curves involved and it makes it so it has no fill or anything I'm really not sure what this tool does to be honest with you if you do know feel free to enlighten me I just know that I haven't had a use for it so let's see what's next combined okay so I'll select those both and I'll go to combine and you know what let me actually undo that I'm going to create a copy of this combined works very similar to Union let me go to path Union and combine it combine those together into one object then I'll come by I'll take those two and I'll go to path combined and again we had the same result but what's the difference between these two well if we go to the Edit paths by nodes tool and we click on the first one where we did Union you'll see this is there's no there's no other information in here you didn't know that this was a square or a circle because no intersecting points or anything here this is just a salad separate object but if we go over to the one where we did combine and we click on it Inkscape saved some of that information so you can see it's still recognized as a circle and a square turned it into one object but it saved a little more that data so you know that there's still a square in here we have that node right here of the bottom left square we don't have that in here though so Union unifying something is a it's like it's like a more final approach to doing something where is this this is temporary and I don't use the combine often the combined function too often because I usually just use group and ungroup so but that's that's how that works let me get back to my okay so what's next we'll get a path break apart okay let me create something new here I'm going to take this red circle and I'm going to make a few copies of it like that and I'm going to click and drag over all of those and I'm going to unify them together we'll go to path Union and let's say you have a vector object like this a path that's like a bunch of different shapes but it's all it's all connected together you want to be able to color in each shape like let's say you want to make this one green and that one blue you can't really do that because it's registered as a single object but if we go to path break apart Inkscape breaks it up into different little pieces but if you notice it didn't break this into the different little pieces because this is all combined now we did Union instead of combined so this is all you can't break these apart now because it's finalized but these ones as I mentioned we can make this blue and we can make this red so that's how break apart works let me get rid of those so it's next path in sect all right let me take this red circle and I'll duplicate it and create a green circle so we have a green circle above the red circle now with that green circle selected I'll go to path inset and it pretty much just took that image and made it smaller all around the perimeter just like that an outset path outset it works the same way only in Reverse so it makes it larger like that and if we want to do path dynamic offset it does the same thing only it gives you a handle to scale it up and down with so it makes it a little more you have a little more control over the result you get which I really like I like using that so let me get rid of that now if we go to path linked offset it does the same thing as dynamic offset only it creates a separate copy so let me go to a linked offset and I'll turn that green so we could see it and it's actually beneath the red circle so let me raise that up above the red circle I'll go back to the edit pads by nodes tool and again we have this node that we can edit and play with I'm going to make that larger like that and I'll put this over here and what happened was these two shapes right here these two objects are linked together so if I do something to this object right here the same thing is going to happen to that object accordingly so it's pretty much the same thing as dynamic offset as um yeah as dynamic offset only it links it together with the original see that's how that works so let me get rid of that let's see what's next path um simplify okay so let me take the square I'll duplicate that hmm let me go to the edit pads by nodes tool and again Inkscape is recognizing this as a square I could round the corners and and play with this and everything so in order to convert that to a path so I have nodes here I'm going to go to path object to path and I'll go to the edit pads by nodes tool I now have all these nodes here now I'm going to click and drag over those nodes and add new nodes in there just to show you as an example let's say you've been working in Inkscape and you've been putting some time into creating some kind of object or something and by the time you're done creating it it has all these nodes in here well you can go to path simplify and Inkscape will get rid of as many as as many of those nodes as they as it possibly can without changing the original shape of the object so the benefit of having an object with as few nodes as possible is that it's it'll be a smaller size file it won't you know it won't slow down your computer as much if you don't have much memory in your computer having an object with a lot of nodes and it can really slow you down sometimes so that's that's one of the benefits of using that so what's the next path reverse I honestly have no idea what reverse does but if you do again feel free to enlighten me in the comments and paths effect editor that is that's something entirely different we go to path effect editor and we're going to get a whole new menu here so that's going to be a separate video I think maybe the next video I'll go over the path effect editor or maybe in an upcoming video sometime soon and again but the two options beneath that paced path effect and remove path effect those are both relevant to the path effect editor and I'll come I'll cover all three of these in another video so hopefully that gives you some clarity about what these are what these functions are and how and why they work but if you have any questions for me just let me know and I'll be glad to help you out as always thank you for watching

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 257,402

Rating: 4.9760666 out of 5

Keywords: inkscape, learn inkscape, inkscape tutorial, inkscape for beginners

Id: R8lE2wyfSYY

Length: 16min 46sec (1006 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 22 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/JangusKhan]

I just used this to introduce an intern to inkscape. Excellent overview.