Inkscape Lesson 4 - Groups, Levels, and Object Selection

welcome back to another Inkscape tutorial in this video we're going to be looking at different shape object properties we're going to be playing with the group tool so we can group objects together and control them all at once we'll be looking at ways different ways to select objects that might be over top of another and then we'll be looking at some with the different levels that the objects appear on so if I hit the plus key I'll just zoom in a little bit here I'll select the square tool left click and drag to create a nice square if you remember from our last tutorial Inkscape remembers what we did last time so it has this border a certain color that's stroked and then has this fill us another color so I want to change this I can right click go to fill and Stroke I can change my stroke back to something more like default that comes when you first turning escape on will be one millimeter for our stroke and then we'll do our stroke color black and our filled color will people yellow our alpha is up almost all the way look it's 252 255 is the highest so we'll put it back 255 or our Pasties all the way up so now we have a pure solid yellow rectangle square and with a black border so now I'm going to draw some other objects and remember it'll keep in memory it will remember the colors and the stroke settings that I'm using so we'll draw a couple things here this is probably good for now yeah we'll just make a little will make pac-man because he's fun and then we'll change the color of some of these I'll just do this swap with using the bottom bar will change a few of these colors now so I've drawn these four different objects and the first one we drew was the rectangle or square and so this one is going to be the lower most level so if we drag it behind and if we just move it around its behind all these other objects the second thing we drew is this so it's going to be behind these but it's gonna be on top of this one so what I'm showing is the order that you draw things in is the order they appear in the level on top of each other that's different than the layers Inkscape does have layers and we'll be playing with those later but right now everything is drawn in the same layer there's just different levels they are on top of each other in the order that you drew them in so if we want to change the layer we want to change this star to be a different way on a different level I mean we can click here we've done this in earlier videos but we click this button up here raises and lowers two different levels if we're going to raise it all the way to the top we just click raise to top all the way to the bottom lower at the bottom and then it'll be even below the very first object we drew another way we can do that is by using the page up and page down key on the keyboard so I use that quite a bit because sometimes you'll draw something or for example and a good key to learn is the duplicate so if you hit ctrl d it'll duplicate the object and I only have two squares one on top of another but when you duplicate an object it appears on the very top most layer and so sometimes you'll duplicate like for example if you're doing a background we want a nice grey background and we set this to the very bottom but then if I want to duplicate this background I can select it hit control D on my keyboard then it covers up everything so now I have two backgrounds but one is the very top layer ones that are a bottom layer so I'm if I move this out of the way we can see how that works so I'd the Delete key that's a super important key to learn make sure you memorize that one ctrl D to duplicate I think you can do it also I'm sure it's way you can do it some other way but control D's right be able to duplicate you can also do ctrl C so you hit select my object hit ctrl C then at any point you want you can hit control V and it will paste that object again so you get control V control V and you can paste a whole bunch of different at that same object I'll delete these by selecting them hitting the Delete key what else I'm gonna leave this background and delete so you can work it you can move multiple objects at once maybe I want to move this star together with this pac-man guy so I select the pac-man and I hold down the shift key and hit and click the star with my left click as well and now those two will move together and so they had their this own selection they'll also scale together they'll color together if I click like purple they'll both turn purple if I click white double turn white so they'll do whatever I whatever I applied to them will happen to them together if I blur they'll both blur together so anything selected yeah if I want to add a third item in there well I can just hold down shift and click a third item and now all three of these are being selected together if I hit escape none of them are selected I can click on the star and move it I can move any one of them separate but to select them all I can hold down the shift key and select as many things as I want if I wanna select everything I can do it that way another way to do that is just to use your selection window so left click and drag and anything within this selection window will become selected and if we can control we can resize shape cover all that stuff independently what else okay so what if I want a group I'll change this to a green you can group objects so they stay they stay tied to each other so if I want to tie maybe I want to do like a let's make like a snowman let's take this hit ctrl D to duplicate this circle ctrl D again to duplicate this circle I'll make the top one kind of small make the middle one a little bit smaller and yeah so now we have like a nice little snowman here and I always want this object to move together I don't wanna have to move every part of it every time I move I don't want to have to select by hitting shift every time or by dragging them and doing a window select so what I do is I do select everything once and I go up to object go down to group and click group and now group everything together now this behaves as if it's one object every time no matter what circle I click on it'll just select all three of them and I can resize them shape them recover them and they'll all do whatever I whatever action I have them do if I want to ungroup them I can just go to object while it's selected and go to ungroup and that'll ungroup these again and I can control them individually also while they're still grouped so the shortcut to group is control G so let's select them all and go control G a lot of times if you download like a SVG file they'll be grouped items and the first time you open it up sometimes everything is one big group the whole image is one group and you can have groups within groups too but it's sometimes so what you can actually change you can change something in the group without having to ungroup it and to do that you just double click and then you can select a single object you can select all these single objects within the group and then when you hit escape and click on it again oh it stays as just the group so it's still grouped together we didn't have to ungroup to make that change learning to use groups is important you're going to use groups in Inkscape groups are super important and this group too it's gonna be if I lower it down it's gonna lower the entire group which is never think to so nothing behaves independently when it's all selected they all behave as one object basically yeah well what else was I gonna say about groups that's probably about it okay so if we hit the tab key on our keyboard we can select the very bottom most object so that happens to be this one cuz I lower down to the bottom while that selected if I hit the tab key again it'll cycle through every object starting from the lowermost to the uppermost object so that's the way you can find objects sometimes you'll have an object like this pac-man maybe well maybe we want to create like a nice thing like this like a box with pac-man on top of it but pac-man might be on the bottom level so he's behind the box we could move the box and then click and raise it on top but to access an object that's below what we can do is hold down the Alt key and then click on that object so the first time we click it will select the foremost object the second time we click it will select the object behind and then we can see oh and actually if we want to drag it if you want to move it from that point we have to hold keep holding the Alt key so right now if I hold down alt and click it'll select the pac-man and then while still holding alt I left click and drag and I can drag him out okay that's amuse you probably practice because a lot of times you will have an object that's little be hidden behind something and you'll want to be able to click on and you just for whatever reason you won't be able to there'll be too much stuff in the way and you won't be able to click on it so just hold the alt and you can toggle through clicking any item that's behind there so I'm just holding alt while keeping clicking and it's selecting every object through the layer for like I said if you don't have too many to go through you can hit the control key until you find the one you want and then like the pac-man selected right now I can tell because of the size of the selection box and I can raise it up by clicking the level up key or by doing page up and page down yeah if that's all I want to show you in this video play with all that because this is the base the basic building blocks the basic tools you'll need to use when making anything in Inkscape is just learning how to control these objects and move them around one with another selecting them learning how to duplicate it so we can duplicate this one if I could control D right now it duplicates this group and now it's still grouped so we can really you can really start to get crazy if I select all this stuff hit ctrl G now I have another group here then ctrl D and duplicate these a couple times then all of a sudden we've got all kinds of different objects different groups and yeah if I want to contribute and select a few of them we can move these around resize them so play with it just do what I just what I was doing just there play with it get familiar with it and then move on to the next tutorial appreciate you watching catching the next one

Channel: TJ FREE

Views: 234,297

Keywords: vector program, ungroup inkscape, select multiple, learn inkscape, illustrator alternative, inkscape tutorials, inkscape levels, free download, free illustrator, link objects, behind object, in front of, group shapes, inkscape layers, drawing software, free software, svg editor, adobe illustrator, adobe illustrator tutorials, free software like photoshop, vector programs for mac, illustrator alternative free

Id: D_53Cb9aR0c

Length: 10min 26sec (626 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 24 2018