Inkscape Tutorial: Create a Maze

this is Nick with logos by Nick comm and in today's tutorial I'll be demonstrating how you can create this isometric maze icon using Inkscape so I'll go ahead and get started here in Inkscape the first thing we want to do is just set up our documents that we're all working with a similar view in order to do that I'm gonna go to file and document properties I'm gonna set the display units to pixels and I'm going to turn off the visibility of the page border and close out of that and then we'll go to view we want to make sure we have custom selected and then we'll go to zoom and we'll zoom in at 1 to 1 and then what I want to do is open up the Edit objects colors gradients and Stroke menu with that button right there and that will be good to get started so the first thing I want to create is a square so I'm gonna come over here to the squares and rectangles tool and I'm gonna hold ctrl + shift on the keyboard and click and drag on the canvas to create a perfectly symmetrical square like that and once we've done that as you can see here I've made it pretty small so once we've done that I'm gonna go to path object to path and then I'm gonna take the opacity and I'm gonna bring that down about in half and what I'm going to do now is up here where it says snap to smooth nodes I'm going to turn that on I want actually both of these turned on right here where it says snap cusp nodes we want that turned on and then this one turned on as well snap smooth nodes and if you're in if you're unable to turn these on you may have to turn this icon on first or you and if you have that turned on you may have to turn this one on as well and once we have that set what I want to do now is I want to create 400 copies of this square and I want it to be in rows of 20 by 20 so to do that instead of manually duplicating them over and over again I'm gonna use the cloning feature within Inkscape so I'll go to edit clone and create tiled clones and up here we're going to want symmetry selected in this tab simple translation and I want to have this option selected right here that says rows and columns I'm gonna set that to 20 by 20 so just go ahead and manually type that in 20 by 20 and once we've done that we can go ahead and click create and it's gonna create a whole bunch of copies of that square so let me close out of that let me shift this over so you can see what we're working with here just to move the page around I'm just holding ctrl and moving around the mouse like that hold it clicking down the mouse wheel and just moving around the mouse once we've done that I'm just gonna grab this select tool I'm gonna click and drag over all of this you may have to zoom out a little bit in order to do that I'm just gonna hold ctrl and roll down the mouse wheel a couple of times to zoom in and out so you can see what I'm saying here once we have all of that selected what we want to do now is go to edit clone and select unlink clone and it's gonna take a minute or so for therefore that's a process to just go ahead and give that a minute okay so mines done processing what that does is let me click off of that to deselect everything what that does is that creates an actual separate path out of every individual square here because before it was linked together to this one square right here so I'm gonna take that and I'm just gonna press Delete on the keyboard to get rid of that and what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna go through I'm gonna hold shift and click on these squares to create to grab a row of them and just press Delete on the keyboard to get rid of them and that should give you an idea of how it will approach the actual maze shape I'm just gonna go ahead and delete a path out of here so I'm gonna go ahead and delete some more of these shapes press delete maybe come over here delete some of these press delete come over here and do this again I'll come down here and you're just gonna want to do this in like a very random sporadic sort of way press Delete and if you can see what I'm doing here I'm making sure that the pathway is one unit in size it's one actual square in size but you don't want to clear out too many shapes for the path now we want to ideally keep the walls of the maze we want to keep that the same width as well in an ideal world but unfortunately it doesn't always work out that way so let me just go through here and delete some more of these so you can see what I'm saying maybe I'll come down here they'll eat some more come over here and delete that out and then I'll come up here delete some more of these shapes and you should pretty much get the idea of where I'm going with this now one thing I want to point out is that it doesn't have to be an actual maze that you have to go through and follow as if it were a puzzle that the end user was following along with what we're creating here it's just a design it's just it just has to aesthetically look like a maze it doesn't have to actual be a puzzle so I'm gonna go ahead and delete some more of these out again not worrying about it being an actual maze that the user has to follow along with delete that out and again don't to select multiple copies of these squares I'm just holding down the shift key while I do this and delete that out so that should pretty much give you the idea of where I'm going with this so I'm gonna go ahead and finish up deleting out these squares here and I'll speed this up and I'll catch up with you when I'm done okay so as you can see here i finished up creating my maze of shape by deleting out squares and like i mentioned earlier you're gonna want to make the pathway be sized at one unit and ideally the walls would be sized at one unit as well but as you can see here these walls right here there are two units in size and what you know it is an ideal but it's good enough it still looks like a maze it still looks pretty consistent and balanced in my opinion so what we're gonna do now is I'm gonna click and drag over all of this and I'm gonna unify it all together by going to path Union and I'm actually gonna scale this down a little bit I'm gonna press one on the keyboard to zoom out to 100% and I'm gonna hold ctrl and shift and just scale this down to like a good medium-sized like that and then well then I want to rotate this around so I'm gonna click on this again to get the rotation handles and I'm gonna hold ctrl on the keyboard and grab this corner arrow and just rotate this counterclockwise until the corners are going vertically and horizontally like that there and what we're gonna do now is we're going to start coloring this in so I'm gonna take the opacity of this and bring this all the way up to a hundred percent and I'm going to make this a deep shade of reds maybe something like that and then I'm going to duplicate this by right-clicking on it and going to duplicate and I'll make this one a really light shade of red maybe something like that and let me zoom in on this area right here I'm gonna take this duplicate copy and just bring this up until it snaps till this bottom corner snaps into this corner right here so that they're stacked next to each other like that and I may want to add a little bit more color to this so you can see it better on your screen okay that right there is pretty good and what I'm gonna do now is the next step is a little tricky it takes a bit of imagination to visualize what where we're going with this but it's not that difficult to figure it out you should be able to get the hang of it pretty quickly what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna connect all of the corners together I'm gonna create shapes that connect all of the corners together to create the illusion of depth like three dimensions let me show you what I mean I'm gonna grab the Bezier a pen over here the keyboard shortcut for that is B and I'm gonna connect I'm gonna create a shape connecting these four corners together right there like that and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna grab the dropper tool and I'm gonna make that the same color that the dark red is now let me do that again I'm gonna grab the bezzie a pen I'm gonna create another shape connecting these corners together down here I'm gonna grab the dropper tool and I'm gonna make that the same shade this color is right here and that fills in the gaps between the corners like that now the thing is we're gonna use another color we're not going to just stick to these two shades here all of the shapes that are going in this direction where they start out at the left and go downward to the right I'm gonna color in all of those shapes with this dark red the shapes that go the opposite way where they start out to the left and they go upwards and right I'm gonna I'm gonna fill that in with a shade of a shade of red that's more medium that between these two shades right here let me show you what I mean I'm gonna grab the Bezier pen again I come over here I'm gonna create a shape that goes in the direction that goes in this direction right here going upwards to the right and I'm gonna make this a medium shade right like that and I'm gonna go through and create all of these shapes that go in that direction with that shade right there now instead of clicking on the Bezier pen and the dropper tool over and over and over again what I like to do is just use the keyboard shortcut so the keyboard shortcut for the dropper tool is D and this keyboard shortcut for the Bezier pen is B so I want to come over here and I'm gonna create another shape like that close that back to the starting point I'm gonna press D for the dropper and I'm gonna make that the same shade as this right here since it's going upwards into the right and I'm gonna do the same thing again I'm gonna press B to get back to the dropper tool I mean the Bezier pen and I'm gonna create another shape right here again press D to grab that selection of a color and there's gonna be these black outlines on here by default don't worry about that right now once we're done creating all these shapes we're gonna get rid of that all and all in one shot so all that's going to do is create even more clicks for us which this sort of design here we have plenty of clicks as it is so anything to save us time is really valuable let me go through and create another shape here connecting these corners together I'll do the same over here do the same thing over here and again the keyboard shortcuts B and D just going back and forth between those two things and like I mentioned this could be a little tricky you gotta really kind of try to visualize where these things should go but once you get the hang of it it's it's it's a lot easier than it seems here go through and create another shape right here and what I'm gonna do now is I'm just gonna go through and fill this all in so that you don't just sit here and watch me do this for however long that takes and then I'll catch up with you when I'm done you okay so what I've done is I've gone through and I've connected all of the corners together to create shapes and manually in that medium shade all of the shapes that go upwards to the right like I was saying previously so what I'm going to do now is I'm gonna go through and create the shapes going the other way and this darker shade of red now while I'm doing that I'm gonna make sure to keep an eye out for any other shapes going the other direction that I missed because it's entirely possible that I missed some shapes here I missed a few myself when I was creating the thumbnail for the video so just keep an eye out for that in case you come across anything that you missed so I'll go ahead and finish this up and I'll catch up with you when I'm done okay so as you can see here I've gone through and closed in the rest of the shapes here and you can and if you notice it's starting to really take form the three-dimensional aspect of it so what I do now is I'm gonna get rid of these black outlines that I was talking about previously so to do that let me just zoom out a little bit I'm gonna click and drag over everything and I'm gonna hold shift in the keyboard and click on this little red X in the bottom left hand corner of the screen and that's going to get rid of any outlines that are around any objects selected and then once you click off of that you can see we've created this isometric sort of a puzzle piece I mean maze design this isn't quite finished yet though so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna click and drag over everything and I'm gonna group it all together and what I'm gonna do is I'm actually gonna gonna create a duplicate of this so I'm going to right click on this and go to duplicate and bring this over here because what I'm going to do next is gonna be pretty destructive and I want to make sure I have an original copy of this design on hand in case I want to use this just as it is so what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna click on this duplicated copy and I'm gonna take this bottom arrow and I'm just gonna click and drag it up a little bit just to give it a flatter just to change the perspective a bit of the design and as you can see here this right here is the finished maze design so we're going to do now is if I want to make this let's say I want to increase the depth of this what I can do is I can right-click that and go to duplicate and just stack it on top of it like that and I can do that again I could right I can click and drag over both of those right click go to duplicate stack them on top of each other like that and as you can see it increases the depth of the actual object and I could also stack these next to each other let me create another duplicate here I can stack these next to each other if I want to make the design larger so let me right click go to duplicate as you saw me do there I was using the keyboard shortcut instead you could press ctrl D on the keyboard to create duplicates let me just stack them right next to each other like that perfect and I'll do this one more time ctrl D to duplicate put that right there we have to zoom in a little closer to get that and then one more time control D and as you can see here we're starting to get sort of like a pattern type of effect from this may have to group that together in order for that to work or maybe not but I'll just leave that there as it is and that's pretty much it that's how you can go about creating these puzzles these maze puzzles using Inkscape so if you haven't done so already please consider joining the logos by Nick mailing list in order to receive email alerts whenever a new tutorial is posted your information won't be sold to or shared with anyone else and you'll never receive any kind of spam or promotional emails from me whatsoever the only time you'll receive an email is when a new tutorial is posted and you'll get to watch it on the logos by Nick website without any advertisements interrupting your learning experience so go ahead and check the link in the description if you're interested in that if you have any questions let me know and as always thanks for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 17,440

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Id: dhB1P5pWejQ

Length: 15min 9sec (909 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 25 2018