INKSCAPE for Laser Engraving 101 | Vector Editing for Ezcad and Lightburn

hey guys what's going on it's alex over at laser everything and to follow up last week's episode on affinity designer i really wanted to spend some time also talking about inkscape inkscape is another vector editing suite and it is absolutely 100 free to use um there are some trade-offs for that the user interface isn't quite as friendly but it's still a really powerful piece of software and it includes a ton of features that are lacking on affinity designer so whether you want to use this to supplement what affinity designer doesn't offer or you want to use this as your entire vector editing solution we're going to cover everything you need to know how to use this piece of software with your laser machine step by step just like we always do and don't go anywhere because we're getting started right now [Music] all right guys another day another vector editing suite so here we are in inkscape uh and we're gonna start by setting up a brand new document um i've just kind of created a generic one here i want to show you some of the document customizations so if we come into file and we head down to document properties here we're going to get just a basic list of some of our documents set up you can set the border color the desk color that's back here um and the color of the page i like setting the page to just slightly off-white that way we can monitor if we have any white pieces that we need to get rid of for our laser software so not like white white not gray but you know just somewhere kind of off-white will make it really easy to make sure that our vectors are actually transparent when we're working with them another thing i like to customize uh we're in inches five by three just like we do in every other vector editing software tutorial and uh outside of that you know um we don't really need to mess with too much in here uh you can save this as a template if you want to so you can close this and we can come up to file and down here we've got save template which is super easy go ahead and give it a name and a description if you want and you can also save it as the default template that way this opens every time that you open inkscape another thing we need to do before we get too far into this is we need to set an export setting so if we come down to preferences we can come in here and there's a ton i mean just a ton of customizations in here that you can make to how things are set up but what we really want is this input output here and we're looking at svg export these are all checked for me and then we've got svg output and for svg output the only real thing that we need to pay attention to here is our path string format um we want this set to relative okay i don't think it matters so much if this is for light burn and you're using this for light burn but definitely for easy easycad users we want to make sure this is set to relative so go ahead and make sure that that is selected and then we can close this as well so we're ready to get started here we're going to run through all of the same basic things that we do in our other vector editing kind of 101 videos so the very first thing we're going to do is mess around with some text so we're just going to grab the text tool and we'll come in and click and we can go ahead and create some basic text maybe laser everything and you can hit ctrl a to select all of that text up here we've got our font selections uh font selections are fairly straightforward so you can just go ahead and click whatever you want to click there uh and that's going to come right up this is laser everything so let's stick with our futura and bold uh so we've got our modifiers up here so if you have you know italics or obliques you can come in and select those right there fairly straightforward and just like with any of our vector editing software we need to make sure that we convert this text into an object we'll do that in inkscape by coming up to path and then object to path and there it is right there there's a few ways we can make sure that we did that successfully one is double clicking the text if we double click we should be able to select individual letters with the node editing tool that's this selector right here so when we go in and click each of these it should show up as nodes so we definitely don't want to be double clicking and having it enter the text editor right if that's the case then we didn't expand this properly the other way we can check is we can come up to layer and we're just going to click layers and objects and that's going to open this layer in objects panel right over here on the right side and here we can see our text has been converted to paths so again very straightforward it's not that complicated just to show you the difference i'll go ahead and create another bit of text here so we can do laser everything there we go just like that and you can see this one definitely showing up as text over here in the layers and objects panel this text looks a little funky because it's got a stroke on it we can come down here to edit our fill color and stroke color that's in the bottom left corner so we go ahead and click stroke and we can change the stroke to no fill and now it's looking normal we also have the same finer control over our text so if we select our text here we have things like line spacing right so you can go in and manually adjust that line spacing if you want to do that you've got your text alignment tools over here and some other kind of paragraph settings if you want to use those as well as text size so um all of those tools are available to you up here in this top bar when you have your text selected so the next thing we're going to talk about are path effects and that's up here under path so let's go ahead and select our text and we'll come down to path and path effects and this is going to open up a new window for us uh over here in the side panel this side panel by the way is all of your open tools so you can swap between them at any point they don't close they just kind of share this space up here so if you want to close them you can hit the little x but i like kind of as i'm working just to keep them all open because i'm going to definitely be using fill and stroke again i'm going to definitely be looking at our objects our layers and objects again but over here path effects is how we're going to do things like envelope warps and things like that notice we're still in text form over here and i can't click this plus button so in order to actually use pathfx we need to again expand this text so we'll come back up to path and we're going to do object to path and that'll change that text object to paths we can double check that over here in the layers and objects panel so there are the paths that make up this text and once that's done now in this path effects window we can actually hit the plus button and it gives us a ton of different options just a bunch of stuff that we can do with this text now the one i really want to show you is the envelope deformation this is one of those tools that is missing from affinity designer and so we can go ahead and click that and it gives you a lot of options down here this looks really complicated um but really all we need to worry about are these little buttons right here if we hover over it it says edit on canvas and that means that we're actually going to physically be able to manipulate it like visually and i usually think that's the best way to go so if we give ourselves a little more space down here we can click the top bend path and that's actually going to give us this bar right here and we can go ahead and start manipulating that text and we can use this to fill different shapes or arch text if we want to architect so the arch is pretty basic so we'll go ahead and pull that up in the center there and then we can grab the bottom bend path as well and we can commit to the arch so you know uh there's there's a lot of different things you can do you can kind of go for that fish style if you want to go for the fish style you can bend the whole thing upwards so you know like i said there's a lot that you can do here um and you can mess with these envelope distortions for a long time we could kind of go for like a wave if we wanted to go for like a wave we could do the top bend up there on the right and then bend this one up here you know kind of something like that um if we need to we can just grab this one um and this isn't the only path effect there are a ton of different path effects that we can add we can just hit the plus button and add another one uh so a common one that gets used all of the time is the lattice deformation so you can come in here and you can actually move these points individually to get the desired effect the desired shapes and you can just kind of come in and grab each of these little nodes and you can get some interesting results here with those path effects the last one i will show you guys really quick we can come in here we've got our text right there and here you can see each of these letters is an individual object right now because we duplicated the original set up here if you need to be able to put a path effect on something like this down here in the pathfx tool it says only one item can be selected so it's telling us we can only do one of these letters at a time the fix for this is really simple we'll just come up to path and we're going to hit combine and that's going to combine all of these paths into what inkscape will see as one object now you can see our plus button is lit back up we can click it and the one we're going to add finally is perspective or envelope and this one's really nice because this one actually allows you to move the perspective so if you're looking at the text from like the side you're trying to put your text on like the side of a building or something like that this is this is going to allow you to do that really easily so with the perspective envelope path effect active we can come into the node tool and it's actually going to give us these nodes here so we can go ahead and drag these up and down and that instantly i mean the effect is very clear uh you know this has perspective now which is awesome um and of course you can you know skew these however you need to skew them together to look natural if you're trying to make it look like it's laid out on a floor or something or i know jimmy always puts logos on the back of trailers in photos that he's doing so that's how you put the path effects on and it's really really useful for being able to handle a lot of these different situations the last thing that i will warn you about is we need to kind of finalize these path effects once we apply them to our text so the way you do that is the same way you get it from text to a path in the first place so we'll just select the thing with the path effects on it and we're going to come to path and object to path again now you'll see all of our path effects go away and if we look in the layers and objects panel the text that's selected here is back to just being normal paths and that is ideal that's what we want and again we can test this by double clicking it and we can take a look here we'll just control and scroll to zoom in and you can see the e is outlined there because it is a standalone object so we have to make sure that we do this when we're done applying path effects if we don't do this it's not going to import correctly so same thing down here if i select this now you can see all the nodes where the actual text is not the effect that has been applied to it so we'll come to our path and we're going to do object to path and there we go that's kind of finalized our changes for us so that's path effects and you can use this on any shape this isn't just for text any object any shape in inkscape can be uh changed or customized with path effects so very cool very useful tool if you guys have been watching the vector editing tutorials on the channel then you know the next thing that is coming up is text on a circle and it's a little bit different in inkscape than it is in other pieces of software so it's important to take some time to talk about that here really quick though i do want to take a second now that we have some objects on the page to talk about transforming so if we click and drag we're going to move stuff around the page if we hold control and drag a corner that's going to maintain our aspect ratio uh that's really important for making sure that we're not distorting things so control is the one that i use the most if we hold shift that's center out so if you're trying to keep something in the same spot and just make it bigger or smaller that's going to be the shift key there and of course you can combine shift and control to make sure you maintain aspect ratio from center out so uh very important also we have the grab to move so in other pieces of software that's typically you're going to hit the space bar and then click and drag to move around the page in inkscape it's just the spacebar so if you just hold the space bar down and move the mouse that's going to move you around the page you can also use the middle mouse button so if you click the middle mouse button in you can use that to pan around as well so i just want to cover some of those basic controls you're going to see me use them a lot as we move through this tutorial something else i want to take a look at really quick um the way that inkscape handles paths and text groups is a little weird so i like to keep it a little more tidy and i'm going to show you how to deal with that really quick so up here we've got just a bunch of loose paths that make up this laser everything up top and if we want to just kind of seal the deal on these we can come up to path and do a combine real quick and that's going to just tell inkscape that we want this to all be considered one thing one path one object now you can see we've only got the one path highlighted down here that just kind of makes it a little easier to manage stuff over here it may also help with exporting potentially but that's kind of up in the air we'll talk about exporting later but we have a lot more paths that we need to deal with so if we select this one down here we can see this is just this laser everything right there uh and then we've got the one that we did the envelope distort on and this is in a grouped folder with a bunch of paths we can do the same thing down here too so we can select all of these just come up to path and combine now we've got these three paths for these three blocks of text and that just kind of keeps your layers panel you know a little more tidy a little easier to manage we don't actually need these folders or groups either we can simply pull these out uh just like this and then we can get rid of these folders with the delete key on the keyboard and that's just going to leave us with three nice paths now don't worry if you do need to come in and maybe separate these two words or you need to edit this in some other way and we need to break this back apart it's actually really easy to do we just select it we can come up to path and we come down to split path and that's going to split it back up into its individual pieces what we don't want to do i'll just undo that here what we don't want to do is do path uh break apart okay because what break apart is going to do is it's actually going to break apart every single individual piece including the inside of letters that have like hollow insides and that's really difficult to repair so if you need to break something that you've combined back up always use the path split path feature right here and that's going to just break that up into individual letters then you can you know combine just like one word at a time so we could do path uh combined and we can over here as well path combine and then we can use these two combined groups to uh you know center things up or level things rotate things whatever if we want to work on these independently that's how you would handle that next up we're going to briefly talk about text around a circle so in order to do that we have our circle tool right here our ellipse tool we're going to click and drag we're going to hold ctrl so we get a nice perfect circle there and we're going to let it go and once we have our circle we're going to grab our text tool and we're just going to type out the text if we go ahead and start typing we can just do some text so maybe like laser everything we'll just do laser everything that's fine uh we're gonna grab our text now and hold shift and grab the circle and then we're gonna come up to text and we're going to do put on path and that's going to lock the text right onto the circle there so from here we have to get this thing rotated and rather than rotating the text we're actually going to rotate the circle and so we can just click the circle twice and we get the little handlebars here to rotate that and we just want to rotate it up so that it's about center if you want to get it perfect the best way to get it perfect is to come up here and grab a guide and just drag it down and get it to touch one of the sides of the text and then you can just pull it to even it out between the two if you want you can continue to adjust this by bringing it just a little bit closer and then making further adjustments right until you get it in the sweet spot there when you're done you can select the guide and hit the delete key on your keyboard and that'll go away you can also edit the text after putting it up here so if you want to change anything we can double click and edit on the fly so maybe we'll add llc to the end of this let's do caps llc and uh yeah i mean that looks pretty good um you know what i don't love the capitals up here so we can change that to everything great uh llc so that looks perfect and then the last thing we need to do uh if we delete this circle right now we're gonna lose our curve on our text so what we need to do is actually expand this text as well just like we've done with everything else so far so we're going to come into path and object to path and now just like before this is its own object so if we delete the circle everything's going to be right where we left it so they're independent now because we expanded this text object to a path that does mean that this text isn't editable anymore but it does preserve this if we want to get rid of the circle we're not quite done with the circle yet so we're going to leave it here if you want a clearer picture about how text that dips below the line is looking too we don't need to leave this a solid black circle there's no need for that so if you select it we can come back up to our fill and stroke here remember we got to that down here in the bottom left corner and we can set our fill to no fill and then we can just add a minimal stroke just so that we can see the outline and uh it's a lot easier to work with that way but what if we want text on the inside going the other way well that's actually pretty easy too since our text is going to be running along the inside of the circle we want to make sure that it's in line with our outer text so we'll just grab the circle here and remember we're going to use shift and control so that we're center out and we maintain our aspect ratio we're just going to pull that circle out until it's touching the tops of the lettering that we have running along the outside edge so there we go we've got our new circle and then all we need to do is again uh grab our text tool we're going to type some new text so maybe like established 2019 i think that sounds pretty good um and you'll notice here we've got the uh the stroke right and the fill set backwards and that's just because we had just changed it for the circle so with our text selected here we can come back into the fill and stroke and we're just going to set it to no stroke and a solid fill and that'll fix that up for us so here's our text and we're going to do the same thing we're going to grab the text and then we're going to shift and select the circle we're going to come to text and we're going to do put on path and that's going to throw it back up there what we need to do now is i mean if we have any editing to do we can do that so you know maybe we want to make this just slightly smaller maybe six point font and maybe we want to add some text because it looks pretty short so um you know we could say uh everything laser on youtube with a couple extra spaces so that we can put something pretty in there uh establish 2019. i think that looks better and then same thing here guys we're not going to rotate the text we're actually going to grab the circle and we're going to rotate that all the way around and then if we want to move this to the inside of the circle all we need to do is use our mirror functionality of the flip functionality up here if we click that it's actually going to be along the inside of the circle which i guess we have to rotate again no big deal just go ahead and bring that back down just like that and finally if we want to make sure this is absolutely center again we're just going to grab the guide we'll bring it down we'll get as close to one of the sides as possible and then we're just going to rotate this until they're the same distance away from the line and again we can adjust the guide as needed so that looks really good to me right there and last but not least we're just going to select the text we're going to do path object to path to free that from the circle and then at this point you know we can do whatever we want with the circle we can make it a little bigger and use it as you know some kind of decorative piece or make it smaller and do a design in there or we can just delete it all together we don't actually need it we don't need the guide any longer either now we can start putting kind of like some flourishy stuff in if that's something that we wanted to do and actually you know what we'll keep the circle for that because that'll help us with placement so if we select the circle shift and control so that we're center out right and here we can see things are actually lining up quite nicely so if we get this right along the bottom of the larger text and then the smaller text isn't quite touching but that's okay because it is smaller text and then we'll just come in if we want to do like our little flourishes like we have been doing again control so we get like a nice clean ellipse uh something like that looks good and then we can move it into position and we're just touching our guideline here and then we can do control d which will duplicate that'll make us a copy and we can drag it out and if we hold ctrl that locks it to the axis right there so we can bring that one over and just kind of like let that sit uh just barely touching the line so we know that those two are parallel and finally if we want maybe just like a little thing going on down here that's no problem we can come in grab our text tool maybe do like a little tilde or something see if i can get one that looks good and uh we can click this we'll give it just a little bit of a rotation so that it looks about what it needs to look like and we'll just drop that in place right there uh so there it is guys i mean that's the circle text uh we did it we're done that's looking really really good i thought our circular logo looked a little empty so i brought in the laser everything logo just so we could drop that in the middle uh it's a good chance to show you guys the align tools real quick so if we select our logo and we select the circle all we need to do is come up to object and then we can come to align and distribute and that's going to open a new tab up here in our options tab so we have the layers we have the fill we have our path effects these are all things we've opened and now the align and distribute is open up here as well and same thing as always center and center we just want to make sure relative to and then last selected because we don't want our circle to go anywhere that was the last thing we picked so i'll show you one more time we're picking the laser everything logo first holding shift and then picking the circle last so this will be what we are referencing when we're centering up the logo now we can click center and center the logo will move right to the center we can go ahead and finally delete this circle i think we're actually done with it now so we can hold ctrl and shift here and grab the corner and just pull out and that's looking really really fresh that looks pretty nice actually because the text on the bottom is a little smaller it does feel a little further away than it feels on the top so if you want to you could use the arrow keys and just knock that down a touch i think that looks pretty nice overall it's good enough for today's demonstration anyway so now we're going to take our first look at boolean operations uh by negating this graphic here so if we wanted the opposite of this for maybe like a coin or something we would want to negate this so that the text and the logo were rising up out of the metal instead of being engraved pretty easy to do so we're going to grab another ellipse we're going to hold ctrl again and we're going to pull that down just so it's a little bit bigger than what we've got over here that we're working with and uh we're going to let's make a copy so i'm going to ctrl d to duplicate because i do like this and i don't want to lose it if something goes wrong so again control i'm just going to make that a little smaller and we'll just put this over here for safekeeping we'll grab the new one and let's set this new one to white we're going to want to see it on top of our our circle over here and remember this is why we kind of set that page color to an off-white in the very beginning because now we can actually see this we can see what we're working with and you don't want to do this but just hang with me for a second here i'm going to ctrl g that'll group this so this will be grouped together okay and we're going to center this up so again we're selecting the logo we're selecting our circle we still have aligned and distribute open we're going to do center center and then we need to send this circle to the back so we can see our white text on top so i'm going to come down uh up here to lower selection to bottom and now that's in the back so we've got things kind of set up the way that we need to in order to perform our first boolean operation to cut this out kind of cookie cutter style what we need to do is come up to path and our boolean operations are here with union difference intersection exclusion division and so those are the main ones and the one that we want is exclusion and if i click this nothing is going to happen and we get a little error down here one of the objects is not a path cannot perform boolean operation and the reason for that is because uh this white bit here is actually a group we've got all these different paths inside of this group and that's no good so we actually can't perform boolean operations on groups in inkscape that's something we can do in illustrator but we cannot do it in inkscape so we're going to pull this out we need to we need to clean this up we have not been very responsible with how we are handling all of the assets here and this is one of the downsides of inkscape is that you need to be a little more particular with caring for this kind of stuff so let's ungroup this ctrl shift g and let's inspect these elements and kind of see what's causing us problems here if we look over here the layers tab this is just so useful for us because it's going to show us exactly where the problems are we've got a lot of stuff going on we've got two text folders we've got a bunch of paths with different names we have a piece of text still we never expanded our little tilde there so that's a problem um and then we've got this new path which is our logo uh we have our circles with there's just a bunch of stuff we need to we need to get this all cleaned up uh fairly quickly so what we're gonna do is we're just gonna select these and just make sure they're all individual paths so here we have our logo and if you double click you can actually rename these to keep track of them a little better so we've got logo um up here we've got our top text and let's find that highlighted down here uh so here it is in the folder uh text so what we're going to do just like we did last time we're going to select all of this and we're going to come to path and combine right and that's going to combine that so we'll call this bit of text here it's double click and we'll just call this llc uh just so we can keep track of things because a lot of stuff on the page now um these two are circles right here so we've got one circle there another here these can be combined so we can actually path and combine and we can call these decor circle all right we're just moving along here we've accidentally clicked the zero in this bit of text so this whole bit down here uh this is all of that text that's made up the uh everything laser on youtube established 2019 that's all of this right here so with this we can actually combine this and we can also combine it with our tilde but we have to expand that first so we've got all our paths here let's go to path combine and we'll call this established okay so now you can see things are shaping up fairly quickly here here's that text asset right here and this text is that tilde so we need to uh path object to path and then our tilde is here so we can call this tilde and let's see i think that's everything so everything should now be its own little kind of path group this stuff up here is from our copy that we've saved and if we don't want to pay attention to this we can actually group this into a folder and we can name this uh backup logo so now we know that everything in this folder is part of the backup logo we don't need to pay attention to that so back to the main thing over here so we've got our logo we've got our tilde we've got our decoration circles we've got our established text and we've got our llc text now what we can do is we can actually combine all of these things together i prefer to pull them out of their folders so i'm just going to bring that up to uh the way the tippy top up here out of the back of logo folder we don't want to put it in there by accident we've got our tilde here so let's move our tilde up we've got our decor circles we've got our established right there and then these text folders are all empty we can't drop them down so they're all empty so we can get rid of those and this last circle over here is just the circle we're using for negating so that's fine on its own so logo tilde decor circles and the established date we're missing our llc text oh and our llc text is right down here so all of these things are actually still in this backup logo folder so let's go ahead and move those out we'll just bring that down to the bottom perfect we can close this up so we don't have to pay attention to it so we've got our llc logo tilde decor circles and established and now we can take all of these and we'll do path and combine we're not making any more changes to this so having this in one path called llc really probably the best way to to deal with this just so it doesn't cause problems for us when we're trying to do our booleans again this is much easier in something like illustrator because essentially when we group things it's combining the paths for us so you can perform boolean operations on grouped paths in illustrator we can't do that in escape so that's why this kind of management over here is really important okay so here we finally got our combined llc we can set this back to white we're going to shift onto the circle and we're going to align again so let's come back over to our align and distribute and we'll center center we're going to move the circle to the end again to the back so lower selection to bottom and now we're ready to perform our boolean operation and i'm actually going to do it kind of off the page here a little bit because i want you guys to see the effect so we're going to select both we've got our combined paths for our logo selected and we've got our circle selected and we're going to come up to path once again and this time we're going to click exclusion and this is going to chop out anything on top from the bottom most piece so there you go you can see it's totally transparent this is nice if you put in the effort because you actually don't have any double lines here that you need to deal with everything is really kind of just done for you and exclusion is a really nice tool so um that's our first boolean operation and that allowed us to make this really nice negative image with our logo so here we've got our backup logo folder uh that we kind of grouped together so we've got the uh we've got the inverted now and we've got the regular version uh let's just take a second we're going to ungroup this ctrl shift g um and let's prep this for export too because we are going to export both of these and we don't want any trouble with any of this stuff being forgotten so the first thing we need to do we've got that tilled down there one more time let's do this we'll do it together one more time a little bit faster here so we need to object to path on that tilde to make it a path we need to we've got our logo here here we've got our decor circles here we've got our established text so we can grab all of those paths for the established text we're going to come to bath and combine and then here we've got our llc text so we're going to grab this path shift click and we're going to do path and we're going to do combine so now we've got all of these individual elements here and we can bring them out of their folders if we want to i think we can even just grab all of them like this no problem just like that and then we can come to path and combine and yes that does in fact work it pulls all of those assets out of their individual folders so we can delete those folders and now we've got our normal non-inverted version ready to export as well the same rules apply here guys so if we need to move or change something with this the combine is not super permanent we can just come back up to path and we can do split path again and that is going to break it into its individual components so you can always come in and make changes to this if you need to but i find combining them is the best way to have them prepped for export and it really allows you to keep your layers panel over here nice and organized so let's go ahead and just recombine that one more time and this is really nice to look at now and we could go through and name all of these things as well so that we know uh what exactly is on our page and you know where we can find it in the layers panel if we need to make changes in fact i might just do that really quick all right so quick snap of the fingers there and i've got these all labeled remember double click in order to take care of that and from here we're in really good shape we've got everything in layer one it's all labeled it's all combined appropriately so this is a really pro piece of artwork right now this is going to be super laser friendly for us now that this is done let's talk about some of the other boolean operations just in case we want to use those for anything so we go over these in some of the other pieces of software we'll talk about them really quick in this episode as well it's not really a big deal so if we have two shapes it doesn't matter what shapes they are just any two shapes and and we need to export them we want them to look like this let's actually go ahead and set those to black just so they're a little easier to see you know i talk about this a lot on the channel guys but we can't have overlap okay laser software does not like overlapping objects so we need to combine them and that's going to be path and union okay so we'll go ahead and hit union here and boom it's welded into one shape ready to go there are a lot of other things that we can do with those boolean operations as well so if i just set these back to black again i undid a little too far we can come up to path and let's look at difference so difference leaves whichever one is on the bottom so here this was the one on the bottom so the top vector was removed and we have a nice little cutout there now we can also take a look at uh exclusion so exclusion is that every other it's kind of like xor infinity designer so this one is filled that one is empty this one is filled right so it's kind of like that hopscotch version of boolean there and then we've got division so if we go ahead and use division that's going to cut this middle piece and this bottom piece into two parts and we lose the rest of what's going on over here division's a little weird and how it works i don't really have a good way to explain it but definitely experiment with it because it's going to really be helpful especially when you're trying to get two little nubs out of something a little bit larger uh division can be a big help so in classic laser everything style let's uh create two ellipses here and we'll do the uh the moon trick real quick okay so we've got our two circles we're going to line them up over one another and we're trying to build our moon and we can't really see uh which one is going to give us the moon cut out what the moon cutout is going to look like so inkscape doesn't give us bounding boxes that actually hug the outline of the shape but they're always rectangles which is one of my biggest pet peeves about this software but there's a pretty easy solution it's kind of a workaround we can come up to view and we can go to display mode and just do outlines and then we can actually see those intersection points and the overlapping areas so if we want a moon right we can make a moon just about whatever shape we want just like that that looks perfect and with that done we can come to path and here we'll just go ahead and do division and that's going to give us our little moon slice right there and we can always come back to view display mode and normal again to see the pieces that we've left behind so we actually don't need that anymore we've got our moon so super duper easy and as you guys know i like to make that little logo so we will do control d to duplicate and we can pull that copy out we can do our mirror so remember you can always mirror and then we can pull the copy back in to where it gives us that little shape and i'm using control here to make sure these stay aligned but i seem to have messed it up a little bit so no worries we can just select both of those we'll come up to our align and distribute and we can just align to top uh very easy and then remember we don't want overlaps we've got uh quite a bit of overlap over here so let's go ahead and come back to our boolean operations under path and union and boom uh we're left with one path very simple to do so boolean operations best friend when you're when you're working with vectors guys you should learn your boolean operations they work a little bit differently in every piece of software inkscapes are a little trickier to use than usual but still definitely gets the job done absolutely okay guys so we're going to work on our little plaque project next uh if you've watched the other art tutorials you know what i'm talking about so we're just dragging this box down here and we'll go ahead and set this to a black fill and let's just check our stroke here make sure that we don't have a stroke applied um so there's a few ways that we can adjust the corners on this right we don't just want like a normal rectangle we want some fancy corners so we can either grab the node tool and this little circle right here will allow us to change our curves and we can control both axis independently or we can control them both together and we're going to do that by holding control down and then moving the node this is really great for simple corners but if we want to get a little more advanced we're going to move into our uh path effects which is up here somewhere it's this one right here path effects so um in order to do this uh for the best results we really want to convert this rectangle into a path so we're going to do path object to path just like we've been doing on everything else and our little plus button lights up so we can click it let's go ahead and click that and this is the one we're looking for right here corners fillet and chamfer right so we'll hit the check it will add it and now we've got some controls down here you can adjust the size of the corners in any unit that you'd like we'll do inches for now but millimeters pixels whatever you want to do i typically leave the method on auto and then this little radius in percent here i would just want to warn you about this i don't know why i don't understand why maybe someone can explain it in the comments but if we check this radius and percent and we start rounding the corners they actually don't round evenly so you can see the top left and bottom right have less of a curve than the top right and bottom left i don't know why that is uh but if we come in here and we just set this back to zero and we uncheck that box so that we're using our units field here instead and we round those corners out they all round equally so weird thing just thought i'd point that out if anybody knows why you can leave a comment down below um we're going to skip chamfer steps for now and i just want to show you what some of our options are for these corners they're not just rounded we have a few different options here so the one you're looking at right now is called filet and then we also have the inverse fillet which is kind of like our fancy plaque notched corners there we also have the chamfer which is that straight edge and then we have what's called inverse chamfer chamfer and verse chamfer don't really look different and that's because our chamfer steps are set to one the steps are how many straight lines it takes to complete a curve so here we have a straight edge and then we have one step and then another straight edge if we up this to two you can see we have a straight edge and then one two steps and then another straight edge so that's what chamfer steps does so you can go up uh higher and higher and higher here until essentially you're back to rounded corners so um you don't want to go too too hard on that but it can make some neat things and this is where we really see the difference between uh the chamfer and the inverse chamfer so you're looking at the regular chamfer here you can see the angle points outwards and if we go to inverse chamfer the angle points inwards so that's the difference you can continue to add steps just like you can with the normal chamfer on the inverse but i think i like inverse fillet for this project this radius is huge that looks ridiculous so we'll go ahead and tone that down just a little bit i think something like this looks pretty good and from here we have one last thing to do just like we did with the text if we want to confirm these changes with our path effects here we have to go to path object to path and once we do that we'll see our path effect list is empty which means we've confirmed this shape and we can check our layers and objects panel here just to see that that's true so if i deselect it and we click it again we've got just the one rectangle there this is a really important step this object to path step notice over here this one at the beginning of the episode was all like wiggly and funky uh because we used our envelope distort on it and i didn't save it and it reverted at some point during the episode i'm just noticing now looking over at it um it it did not save which is not what we want right um so again i'll just show you really quick we'll just come in here let's just redo that work super quick um where is it uh we did the perspective one we saved that one we want not lattice deformation but envelope deformation here we go uh so now we can you know kind of reproduce what we had done uh to this one initially and then we skipped a vital step what we didn't do here is uh we we did not convert this to a path so the last step here would have been path object to path and that saves that the way that we need it we can check it over here laser everything just one path no weird groups or anything so now this is ready to go and again we can double check that by double clicking it we can see all the nodes everything is nice and permanent so i just want to really harp on that that that's an important step but we could lose these corners if we don't object to path or rectangle so now we need to add some mounting holes and mounting holes are pretty easy to do um again we can just we can either make an ellipse here right um and we can set these to white uh so that we can see them so if i just click down here on white and we bring this over right then we can see that there or again we could come to view display mode outline just so that we know exactly where these are going however you want to handle that it's totally up to you but we'll just put our couple mounting holes in here really quick so i'm going to control d to duplicate and we're going to hold ctrl to pull this out and across and then we're going to select both control d to duplicate and we're going to hold ctrl and drag that one down to the bottom of the plaque just like that and then the last step here or second to last rather is we're going to select all four because remember we can't group these right these cannot be grouped or we will not be able to perform our boolean to stamp these out of our plaque so instead we're going to come to path and we're going to go to combine and just make sure those are nice and combined and then we're going to shift and select our plaque we're kind of combining all of the skills that we've learned so far here we're going to align so we'll align center center just with that align tab and then once that's done we're ready to perform our boolean so we can switch our view back to normal just to make sure that this works the way we want we'll select the entire thing we're going to come to path and we're going to use the exclusion boolean and there we go so that's punched out now we can drag it down here into the gray to see that it is in fact transparent um so that's looking perfect last but not least if we want to be able to drop things in here these are going to be cut lines right we don't want to mark this we can go ahead and just do our fill and stroke so fill we'll set to nothing stroke will set to black and there we have it so it's one nice clean path that's going to import super well we've got our mounting holes in there it's ready to go all right guys so next up we're going to be talking about image trace and i know we've talked about this before we've talked about it in the affinity designer tutorial actually because affinity designer doesn't have image trace so we actually had to use inkscape in that tutorial to trace our image but we're going to talk about it again because this is the inkscape tutorial and if you have a really simple logo you know something without a lot of detail you can simply paste it in so we'll go ahead and paste that in right here here's our company logo right company name very basic this kind of stuff we can just trace right here in inkscape we don't need to do any prep for it at all so if i right click this we'll see trace bitmap that's what we're looking for so go ahead and click that and it brings up the basic trace panel over here you guys are used to this threshold you can turn the threshold up or down to get the parts of the image that you actually want traced you get a nice little preview window down here you go ahead and pull this out if you want to to get a nice big view of it don't worry about this pixelation that'll actually be smoothed out when it actually does the trace this is just a preview there's also a few different modes up here so we can use edge detection so it'll actually detect the edge we could do color quantization if we have a bunch of different colors going on we also have center line tracing so it'll actually go through and trace the center of these lines so we can add our own stroke and thickness but for now we just want to deal with brightness cut off that's usually the best option and once we have the threshold set where we want it we can hit apply and then we'll pull this back out of the way and over here we now have the original bitmap and the logo sitting on top of it so we can move the bitmap out of the way and you can actually see that there there you go and delete it and we're left with our logo so that's a great way to do really simple logos that don't have a lot going on or logos where we have a sufficient image size that however is not always going to be the case sometimes we'll have logos like this and when we get something like this from a company to engrave on their products doing a simple trace isn't going to work out super well for us i mean this looks okay it's not the worst but it's certainly not the best we'll just go ahead and apply this through just for kicks over here so again you know it's not the worst thing i've ever seen but it's certainly not the best this text down here brewing is kind of rough we're losing a lot of detail in the barrel and the leaves in the bridge so i think we can do better than this and i'm going to kind of talk you through how to do that really fast what we need to do is upscale this image so that inkscape has more pixels to work with while it's tracing that's easy enough to do normally i would do this in photoshop and in the illustrator tutorial we do do it in photoshop but for this one since we're talking open source software we're talking free i've actually gone ahead and installed and is basically the open source alternative uh for photoshop so we'll give this a second to load up here there it is and we should be able to create a new file so we'll do file new and we'll just have like kind of a standard template here we'll hit ok and we can go ahead and scroll and zoom out and we want to paste our graphic into here so there's not a lot of super complex stuff going on in here once we get our image dropped into what we want to do is use the crop tool and we actually want to just crop right into that logo we don't want to leave anything out so make sure that you give a fair amount of space on all sides of this it doesn't have to be perfectly even because we are you know tracing this so we're just going to end up with the vector anyway but just try to get just the the part of the logo you actually want we don't need to deal with all this stuff out here once we have that it's time to up scale so we're going to come into image and we're going to go to scale image and this is how we're going to upscale this thing now right now we have a resolution of 300 by 300 that's fair but 600 is typically better so we'll go ahead and type 600 in the x since our lock is checked it's going to automatically scale the y and that's going to give us twice as many pixels to work with so that's really going to help in fact it's going to give us 4 times as many pixels to work with so we're going to be adding a lot of pixels here but our image size should also be increased so if the image size is too small inkscape's not going to do a great job tracing it so let's go ahead and bump this up somewhere around 2000 is going to be good again we have our lock on so this height is automatically going to adjust for us and that looks perfect and we can hit scale uh it's warning us that this is going to be massive that's okay that's what we want so we'll hit scale it's going to take a second to load and there we go so now it's much bigger we've got a lot more pixels to work with here the last thing we're going to do is a threshold and you guys remember this from the photoshop tutorial if you follow along with the channel it's pretty easy to take care of so all we have to do to perform this threshold is come up to colors and it's right down here in this bottom chunk of the menu threshold and we'll hit ok and this is where it's going to break it up into just black or white and this is kind of like our tracing slider so this is a preview of what our trace is going to look like we can go ahead and adjust the slider until we get the detail that we want to get so we obviously don't want to turn it up so high that we blow out the bridge and our font down here but we don't want to really really crank it uh too low either we're gonna you know have like kind of a staticy image this is a particularly difficult one to deal with too because it does have kind of that wear and tear on it as a logo but i think this looks really good so we can hit ok if we really wanted to we could come in here with the paint brush and we could actually paint brush some of that wear and tear away just to make it look nicer and this would take a while but you know again i'm kind of assuming here guys that this is like you know our worst case scenario um hopefully people aren't bringing us graphics like this very often so we shouldn't have to deal with things this horrible on a regular basis but you know you could spend the time if you wanted to just painting in some of that wear and tear to really clean this up and you can get as into this as you want um the main thing that you want to focus on while you're working on this is just that we aren't losing any legibility right so this is actually the one thing that i think has maybe been just overexposed a little bit or rather underexposed uh is this brewing text here so we can actually come in with a really fine brush and just kind of clean some of that up because our trace is going to get that and while it's going to be pretty small on the final logo it would be nice to kind of save some of that detail in there just to add a little bit of legibility and again i'm not going to go super crazy in here but i'm just going to add just a little bit of that legibility back and then we can go ahead and get on with our trace so here is our kind of cleaned up graphic and we can go ahead and save this so let's go file export and we can pick a file type so we just like a jpeg would be fine or a png just a standard image type jpeg will do for now and let's go ahead and save this somewhere we're not going to lose it the desktop it seems like it would be a good choice we can call this river brew and we'll go ahead and export it we'll turn that quality slider all the way up now we want to get as much data out of those pixels as possible and then we can export and with that done we're finished with we can go ahead and close it we'll discard our changes and we'll move this over here just because it would make a nice reference with our uh our blown up version of the logo so let's just move that over for a second you can either come to file open or we can import and we'll go to the desktop and we'll find our riverbrew.jpg and we'll hit open we'll hit okay and there is our improved file so this one we've really spent a lot of time cleaning up those details and bringing out a lot of that extra stuff that's uh maybe gotten lost in the original trace so once that's done we can compare we'll go ahead and trace bitmap here and we'll just make sure that looks good no we don't really need to make any adjustments because we did all of this hard work in so it's already done for us we can hit apply and then over here we'll right click and we'll trace bitmap and we can really we can adjust this if we want to but i don't know how good we're going to be able to get it and that looks fine so we'll hit apply and finally we'll get rid of the raster images behind our logos and there you can really read the brewing right that looks so much better over here it's it's a lot worse we've gotten rid of all of these you know big chunks missing from the letters in here i feel like you can see the trees and the bridge a little bit better i feel like you can see the barrel a little bit better but really it was all about those little words right there and we really did a great job cleaning that up so we can go ahead and get rid of this and we've got our successful image trace right here so with that done the last thing to do really i mean we'll resize this don't forget to hold ctrl to keep your scale the last thing we have to do is really just take a look at our layers panel over here everything's an individual path still so we're still doing really well we can rename these if we want we'll call this one brew this one over here we can call company and we've got our plaque and what are you uh we've got our logo so uh you know this is a great guys we've we've gotten most of the stuff done that we needed to get done today we did the trace prep we did the inkscape image trace and i think that's all i wanted to cover in software guys so hopefully that helped you use inkscape now let's just briefly chat about how to actually get this into software it's much easier to get things into light burn than it is into easy cad so we're going to do light burn first we're just going to come up to file we're going to go to export and export is going to open in the same window up here where everything else is opened and you can either do documents so that will give you the whole five by three or you can do page you know either way whatever you want to do you could also do selection so if you just select everything on the page that you want to export you can select it all and we can do selection and it's just going to export the stuff that we selected then we're going to set a path so we'll go ahead and set a path here again to the desktop it's probably fine we'll give it a name so we can name this you know ink test one and we'll hit save and that's actually going to save this as a png because i didn't select the drop down here we want this to be svg so let's make sure we select svg there inktest1 uh it's going to the desktop where we selected and we can hit export once that's done we can go ahead and open up light burn here that's just going to take just a second and once we're in light burn we can go to import and we're going to select ink test 1 and hit open and there it is guys that's everything so um you know just to show you we can go ahead and select all this stuff here and we can set it to fill and everything fills perfectly um all of the little details in our trace logo are there so no problem with light burn whatsoever ezcad is going to be a little more difficult though and within easycad we'll go ahead and import a vector and we'll scroll down to inktest2 and hit open and what's going to happen is everything looks fine for the most part except for some reason the way that easycad handles circles it just doesn't agree with inkscape and i've changed just about every setting that i could think to change in inkscape in order to get these curves to come out right you'll notice it's a problem over here as well um it just doesn't work out and if we tried to hatch this uh just to show you things really kind of go south here um it's it's not looking good right so that's okay this is easy enough to work around i've spent a really long time on this episode trying to find out how to get this to import and sometimes the simplest answer is the easiest one so let's talk about that so we know that ezcad doesn't like inkscape svgs and we know that easycad loves adobe version 8 illustrator files unfortunately inkscape can't export to adobe ai files but it can save to another adobe format so if we come down we can do save as and we're going to drop this list down here and what we're looking for is encapsulated postscript or dot eps this is basically a non-proprietary vector file format created by adobe it's very similar to ai so what we're going to do is we're going to save this eps file right here we'll go ahead and save that to the desktop we can't give this a name so we'll just give this inktest.eps and we'll hit save and we're just going to leave all of this same and hit ok and then what we're going to do is we're actually going to pull up this website right here and there's a dozen websites that do exactly this you know this is just the one that i've been using i'll leave a link in the description but you could use anyone anything that will convert an eps to an svg and all we need to do is just choose from files we're going to find our inktest.eps file and hit open and we're going to hit convert and we're just going to convert this eps to an svg and for whatever reason ezcad is not going to have a problem accepting this svg so we'll click download and that's going to download to our downloads folder right there and we can open easycad and we'll go to import and we're going to select our downloads folder and there it is inktest.svg and we can hit open and everything is going to import uh perfectly so all of our circles are intact all of our vectors are ready to go uh if we ungroup this here again you can see that all of our curves are intact everything looks great we can go ahead and start grouping things and hatching them so we can group and hatch and we'll hit ok and we're not going to have any problems hatching anything that we've imported via this method so it is a little bit of a workaround but you guys out there that use inkscape know how big of a pain in the butt exporting from inkscape for easycad can be and i've found that this is absolutely a great workaround so if you're having trouble consider exporting as an eps first and then converting that eps into an svg file uh and you're going to be able to import that right into easycad without any problems whatsoever all right guys so that is inkscape hopefully you got something out of this episode i know that inkscape can feel really challenging especially the first time you open it i mean if you think adobe illustrator has a steep learning curve like you haven't opened inkscape it can be really tough but hopefully this guide got you pointed in the right direction especially with those export instructions at the end if you're an easycad user that just took so much out of me trying to find a working solution and i think the workaround that we ended up coming up with is really elegant and it performs really really well when we're testing it in easycads so hopefully if you don't have the budget for illustrator or you need more features than affinity designer can offer inkscape is going to be the right choice for you it's got a ton of features that we didn't cover in today's episode hopefully we can go over those down the road and start doing a little more kind of like artwork oriented stuff going forward i know you guys really enjoy that kind of content so it's definitely something i'm keeping an eye out on but if you got value out of today's episode don't forget to smash the like button let everybody else know that the content is good and don't forget to subscribe and hit the notification bell so that you get notified the next time i upload a video if you love the channel it's the best thing that ever happened to you don't forget to sign up for the laser master academy it's the number one way to support the channel make sure that we can continue doing the show you get a bunch of bonus goodies for signing up like access to our laser parameter libraries bonus episodes of the podcast in bonus live streams and seriously none of the information that we make available for free publicly on our youtube channel would be here at all if it weren't for our lma members so if you know one thank them and if you want to be one you can sign up right now it's over at masters.laserverything.net special shout out to everybody who's made the show possible so far and i hope more of you can join us in the future that's all i've got guys thanks so much for watching this episode of laser everything and we will see you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Laser Everything

Views: 68,028

Keywords: how to create artwork for laser engraving machines, how to create artwork for laser engravers, laser engraving artwork tutorial, fiber laser artwork, laser engraivng artwork guide, vector art for beginners, laser vector art, ezcad vector prep, lightburn vector prep, lightburn vector art, ezcad vector art, affinity designer for beginners, inkscape for ezcad, inkscape for fiber laser, inkscape program, Inkscape 101, Inkscape tutorials, inkscpae guide, inkscape for beginners

Id: 8gICLAiJLZY

Length: 64min 47sec (3887 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 08 2022