Inkscape Tutorial (Part 1/2: Beginner) For Engineers And Shaper Origin Users

and it's time for our inkscape tutorial and you know what that means the first 517 customers who will call will receive an exclusive welcome back to botchbudworks and yes we're actually doing an inkscape beginners tutorial today so you may ask why make another inkscape tutorial when there's already lots of them out there on youtube well in my opinion most of them are for artists and not so much for engineers so they don't explore the tools for making exact measurements in inkscape as deep as i'd like also they seem to be either long multi-part video series or just a five to ten minute overview of what's basically possible in inkscape i started a quick poll on my youtube page and got some positive responses from the community so here we go i suggest you follow along on your own computer that way you'll have your inkscape set up and your skills ready by the end of this video i've got a lot of stuff that i'd like to show you so i'll probably be dividing this tutorial into two videos the first one is going to be a beginner's tutorial so we're going to start with a clean inkscape and make a cuttable file for the shaper origin the second one will be an advanced tutorial where i'll be showing you how to work with files imported from other cad software and how to automatically round corners etc although this tutorial will be tailored to creating svg designs for the shaper origin most of the knowledge is applicable to other tools as well such as cnc machines and laser cutters for those of you who haven't heard of the shaper origin [Music] [Music] it's a handheld cnc router with a camera to locate itself using these domino fiducials and a moving spindle to auto correct your movements to the ideal cut path it lets you cut giant designs while being super portable and it's awesome and i'm not being paid to say this but as an engineer i can help myself let's get started in inkscape inkscape is a software for creating and modifying scalable vector graphics svg is an image format that is different from the pixel-based image format that you're probably used to rather than saving many many pixels with individual colors each in an svg file you save points that then define triangles or circles or bezier curves for one the image is a lot smaller when saved because you have to save much less data and on the other hand you can scale these images without them losing any resolution or getting these blurry pixelated edges this is especially useful for cnc machining because the cut path is already defined in an svg file and does not have to be extracted out of a pixel-based photograph the basic workflow i'm going to show you in this beginner's tutorial is how to create a new design then how to color it so that the shaper origin will detect cuts as outside or inside cuts or online cuts and then how to export the file so the shaper origin will be able to read it for more complex projects you might not want to create the design directly in inkscape but rather import cad files from softwares like catia or autodesk inventor the advantage of this is that you can assemble the individual parts of your project in the 3d cad software and then after you've checked that everything fits export 2d views of everything and continue with the workflow in inkscape that i'm going to show you today the disadvantage is that it takes more time to get used to these softwares and that it's sometimes overkill to use a high-level cad software for simpler projects now let's go ahead and download inkscape and focus on setting everything up correctly inkscape is free so you can download it by visiting inkscape.org i'll put a link into the description of this video this is what inkscape should look like the first time you open it now before we dive in and i explain to you what all of these symbols mean we're going to set up some settings by visiting edit preferences first let's expand input output and go to svg output here we want to check this checkbox inline attributes this will improve the compatibility of the exported svg files with the shaper origin next we're going to select tools and switch from the visual bounding box to a geometric bounding box this setting makes inkscape ignore the width of outlines of shapes so as you can see here this black line is pretty large and the dotted line here shows us the actual size of the shape so i could say this shape is supposed to be 100 by 120 millimeters large and inkscape ignores the size of this stroke so if i increase this here the actual size does not change and that's what we want for our cnc mill choose behavior and set the simplification thresholds to the lowest possible value in my case this is 0.0001 more on that later next we'll go to behavior transforms and deselect scale stroke width this setting changes how inkscape scales the outline of shapes so i prefer that the outline always stays at the measurement i entered over here when i scale shapes and if i select this checkbox then as you can see if i scale this down then the line gets really thin so i'm just going to deselect this let's go to steps and change the inset outset steps to 0.1 millimeters or if you're working in inches then choose a lower value than the initial 1 inch or 1 millimeter in my case with this value we can change the behavior of the erode and dilate commands that i'm going to show you in the advanced tutorial that's it for the settings in the preferences dialog next we're going to jump into file document properties this window pops up in the toolbar on the right here but with right click move to new window you can undock it to have a bit more visibility of all the elements the difference between the system preferences that we just edited and this document properties dialog is that you should always check the settings in the latter when you open svg files that you did not make with inkscape because svg files exported from for example affinity designer or that you got from the internet might have a different scale setting and different document settings that might lead to the design that you want to cut in the right scale on the shaper origin being too large or too small so always check these settings when you grab a file from someone else the first important setting here is the display units up here so you want to set this to either millimeters or inches i think the default setting is pixels and that's not a measurement that is very useful for cnc machining so set this to something an engineer would use the same goes for this units dialog on the bottom right here so set this to in my case millimeters as well down here is the scale dialog and right now it's set to 1 which has worked fine for me in the past i have read in the forums that some people have problems when they import other svg files and when they're working in inches and this might be due to the fact that other editors assume a pixel density of 72 pixels per inch but inkscape works with a density of 96 pixels per inch so if you import something and in your drawing space notice that a scale is off then you might want to enter a scale of 72 in here rather than 96 maybe that will fix the scaling issue with imports from other editors the last thing that we are going to set up in this dialog is our grid switch to the grids tab and click on new to define a new grid then i'm going to set my unit correctly and set the origin position to 0 and 0 and the spacing in both directions to 1 millimeter i'm now going to talk about the toolbars and the icons that you can see in the control surface don't worry we won't be exploring every individual one of them i just want to show you the most important of them so you can get started with designing by the way in the bottom left you can see what i'm doing with my f1 and f2 keys and the control and the shift key which are used for like zooming or selecting multiple shapes up here are two different editing modes one of them is for selecting entire shapes so if i create a rectangle here then with the select and transform editing modes that i can access by pressing f1 i can select this entire shape move it around rescale it and by clicking on this symbol i can activate the edit paths by nodes option and in this mode i can edit the individual anchor points of for example this busy curve so i can drag them around change their strength and so on if you are having problems selecting anything and you're thinking why why isn't this working the way i'm used to you should probably press f1 and then you're back to the standard selection mode for the more macroscopic operations on your shapes right below we have some shape primitives such as rectangles and circles with the basic curve editing tool i can either create polygons or if i click and drag create these bezier rounded anchor points then there's this text tool that you can use to add text in different styles to your designs and at the very bottom there's a ruler that we can use to measure angles and distances inside our designs the most important icons in this top toolbar are these quick transformations that i can use to horizontally or vertically flip a design and rotate by 90 degrees then to the right there are some options to change our object hierarchy so for example i want this ellipse to be below this rectangle then i can move the ellipse downwards and there we go and last but not least these four dialog boxes that change the position and the size of your shapes so if i want this rectangle to be exactly 60 millimeters wide and 10 millimeters high then this is where i would do that in the toolbar on the far right you will find options to change how things snap the topmost icon turns snapping on or off globally and with the options below you can change more specific ways of snapping you can hover over them to get a tool tip to give you an example if i turn on snapping to object middle point then if i grab this ellipse then you can see i get this x symbol in the middle and it starts snapping to our grid positions i could turn snapping to the grid off down here and now it no longer snaps to the grid so if i grab it here you can see it moves freely but it will snap to the center points of other shapes because this center point option is still on i could turn on snapping to paths remember i still have the center point snapping on so now the center point will snap to this curve over here and of course you can also set this to the edges or the corners it gives you a lot of control to just drag shapes together and build the shape that you want to have by changing the snapping modes over here if you want to override the snapping you can hold the shift key while dragging a shape around the control and shift keys are also really useful when creating new shapes to give you an example if i select the ellipse tool and now start holding the control key then i am able to make a nice circle and don't have to kind of guess when it's a circle so the control key lets us maintain the scale on both axes and the shift key will let us draw around the center so if i press shift and control at the same time i can create a perfect circle around the point that i selected at first so ctrl shift like that same goes for rectangles as you can see on the top here my width and height are exactly the same i'll now select the standard selection mode with f1 and using that i can just click on shapes and rescale those shapes by either dragging the corners or the edges if i click on an already selected shape again then i am able to either shear or rotate this shape you can check how much you've rotated already by watching the toolbar at the bottom of the screen by holding the ctrl key while rotating you can snap in angular increments so in my case 15 degrees by double clicking shapes you can unlock special features for this ellipse i can turn it into a kind of pie chart and for the square i'm going to press f1 to return to my standard selection mode and double click on this rectangle i can round the corners you can also set the rounding magnitude with the dialog box up here so i could say five millimeters and now i have myself a nice five millimeter rounding over here you can change the behavior of this double click editing mode by choosing one of the options in the top toolbar so if for example i want to get back to my original ellipse i could choose this option i'm going to undo this by pressing ctrl z now if i double click again i can change the mode to this one if this is the effect that i want to achieve with my shape so this gives you additional flexibility to get from primitive shapes such as circles and rectangles to some more complex stuff now let me show you how to modify the individual vertices of our curve here i'm going to press f1 to go into the standard selection mode select our curve and the first thing i want to do is to get it above this rectangle so i'm going to select ray selection to top and now if i zoom in by holding the ctrl key and moving my mouse wheel i can press f2 and now you can see the individual vertices have diamonds or squares on top of them so i can click and drag them and of course they also will snap to our grid locations some of them aren't corners like this one but more like a smooth point inside our curve and those have these handles as you can see if i change the length of this handle without changing the angle just the length i can change how this node interacts with this part of the curve now i can change the way these handles behave by control clicking on this node observe how the symbol changes so now it's a circle i can change this to a square and after that i get a diamond and these are different editing modes because right now in the diamond one i can move these handles independently but this will also result in kind of a sharp turn here so it might not be what you want to get out of this mode back into the smooth editing mode if you will i'm just going to control click and i'm back to the square symbol so now the blue handles are connected again this is super useful for cleaning up svgs that you downloaded from the internet or that you converted into svg from a photograph because those sometimes have jagged edges and that's often because these notes are in the diamond editing mode and the bezier curve isn't quite smooth but has these corners and it's usually not what you want when you're cutting with the shaper origin or cnc mill you want kind of a smooth edge that your cutting bit can follow so keep in mind you can always change vertices from corners to smooth ones by control clicking on them one last thing i want to mention concerning this curve is that this is quite obviously an open shape so the shaper origin will not be able to distinguish an outside and an inside of this shape the only thing you're going to be able to do is to cut on the line with the circle for example you could define an outside cut so your milling bits which i will simulate will run around the shape like so that would be an outside cut or inside the shape like so but you can't do that with this bezier curve because it is not closed of course this example is pretty obvious but sometimes you might run into a problem where you create a design load it up in your shape origin and you will wonder why it isn't giving you the option for an inside or an outside cut and it may be that when you zoom in you notice that a path isn't quite closed something like this for example now of course these are two individual paths so that's the next problem but just to show you if you have something like this the shape isn't closed and that might be the root of the problem that you can't do outside in inside cuts so keep that in mind when designing try to use the primitives and if that's not possible and you're working with basic curves then always make sure you click on your initial point at the end so that the shape is closed another way to check if your shape is actually closed is to confirm if you can give it a fill color i'll get to this color menu in a short bit but if it's not possible to fill your shape then it's quite probably not closed i'd like to quickly talk about a few tools that make engineering and designing with exact measurements easier in inkscape the first one is guidelines at the edges of my drawing space there are these rulers with these small triangles that follow my mouse and if i click and drag these rulers then i am able to create horizontal vertical and diagonal guidelines i can move these guidelines around and snap them to certain positions or i can double click on these red dots which is the origin of a guideline and set a position for example 250 millimeters downwards from our document origin which is located on the top left of our page here so the x direction the positive x direction is to the right positive y direction is downwards this line is now where i need it to be and i can now for example on in the right toolbar deselect snapping to grid so now my shapes will no longer snap to the grid but they will snap to this guideline here let me disable the rounded corner and as you can see it snaps to this guideline now and ignores the grid unless i turn the snapping back on the ruler which we talked about in the beginning is another neat tool note that it also snaps so i could for example if i turn the grid snapping back off i could measure the distance between the two corners of this rectangle because the ruler snaps to the corners or i could turn on snapping to the object midpoint and now measure this so if you just set up your snapping correctly the ruler can be extremely powerful and help you position holes that you want to drill in parts or some cutouts whatever you need you can simply use the snapping guide lines and the ruler to get the position that you want you can also enter the position for this shape in these top dialog boxes although those are relative to the top left corner so i could set this top left corner to 112 millimeters in x direction and whatever 270 millimeters in y and there we go but sometimes it's just easier to use the snapping with the grid the guidelines and the ruler um to achieve exactly the layout that you want to cut to access the transform menu we're going to choose object in the top toolbar and click on transform in the toolbox on the right you can see we have a new menu now and there's a few different tabs move scale rotate and so on to give you an example what this can do i can select my shape by pressing f1 and selecting it and we can rotate it like this but that's kind of hazy and even if i click and hold ctrl i can only use these increments so what i can do is to set a precise angle for example 17.4 degrees choose a direction and then if i click on apply down here i can apply this transformation to this shape same goes for moving if i for example want to move this shape by an exact amount and don't want to use the dialog boxes or my grid for example is set to a five millimeter spacing but i want to move it by seven millimeters then this is where i would do this or in this case -7 to move it to the left let's stay in our right toolbox and click on the objects tab in this list you can see all of the shapes that we've drawn so far the one that appears on top here will also be on top of the others geometrically in the design so if i move this over this ellipse and as you can see it's covered and if i select a shape in our drawing window here it's also selected in our list so i could select this ellipse here and move it above a rectangle in the list and now as you can see i've changed the order this is going to be useful later on when we've colored the shapes and we don't want the larger ones to cover the smaller ones because now i can't even see where the circle is and i can't select it so keep an eye on that list order over here it's also pretty useful if you have many different shapes or many individual ones if you want to select multiple shapes you could do this by pressing and holding the shift key but if there's a lot of shapes this can become quite tedious so it's easier to select them here in the list you can also select the first one press and hold the shift key select the last one and then you get a group selection and if i now move them to the bottom of this list then as you can see they're all in the back now and i can only select them by drawing a rectangle and only if i know they're there so maybe not the best idea in this scenario by using specific colors for your fill and your outline you can encode how the shaper origin is going to cut this shape so an outside or an inside cut an online cut a pocketing cut or no cut at all just a guideline in your design to be able to align everything properly shaper has a coloring guide on their website which i'm going to link to in the description but i've also got it here so as you can see there's certain presets if you create a shape with a white fill and a black outline then that means an interior cut so your cutter is going to move on the inside with this encoding it's an outside cut and so on in the fill and stroke menu you have sub tabs for the fill which is the inside color of your shape the stroke which is the outline i'll zoom in because it's hard to see and the stroke style so i could make this thicker or something because we've set the geometric bounding box at the very beginning it doesn't matter how thick your stroke is so you can make this as thick as you want it's just for visual reference so you don't have to pay attention to that it's just important what color it has so if i make this a white fill with a black stroke then we get our interior cut if you want to make sure that the color is 100 correct because sometimes if you do this too quickly then you might drag your mouse against one of these edges and then it's it's not really black it's kind of reddish black you can always check this with the color code down here for a white color it's supposed to look like this all characters are in f and for black six zeros and then two f's so if you kind of do something weird then you'll always see it'll be a non-black or white code for the gray and the blue styles the shaper origin is pretty tolerant so you just have to make sure it isn't white or black just pick anything in between so some some shade of gray is fine that'll work to make a guideline that won't be cut but it's just there for visual reference just choose a blue that you like or very blue in my case but it basically doesn't matter if it's not perfectly blue the shaper origin will recognize it anyway and for our outer rectangle to make this an outside cut we have to set the fill to black and the stroke to black as well this is why the hierarchy in the list the objects list is so important because with these like pure black and white shapes it's really easy to oversee the inner rectangle if it's not positioned correctly so i usually try to move the outline cut which is usually the largest shape in my design to the very bottom in this list by just dragging it or by setting it to the very bottom here in the top toolbar and then it'll be behind everything in inkscape at some point you'll probably want to add text to one of your designs making text in inkscape is pretty simple you just use the text command and write some letters the thing is you can't just cut this text so if you export this file then it won't be cuttable on the shaper origin and that's because we haven't converted it to a path yet doing that is pretty straightforward so i'll select my text by pressing f1 and then choosing path object to path the difference is now if i press f2 i can see the individual nodes and drag them around and even modify the style of my text you have to keep in mind that now it's no longer possible to edit the text in the classical way so what i'd suggest i'm pressing ctrl z to go back make a backup copy of your text so ctrl c ctrl v move that out of the way real quick now i'm going to grab the original and convert it to a path so i can now no longer double click edit that text this one is my my cuttable path now with the notes and this other one is still an inkscape text object that i can edit i can color this with a blue fill and no stroke and now it's a guide line basically so the shape of origin will probably display it anyway but it won't cut it and this is the one you're going to be cutting now i can color this path text to whatever cut type i like so for example remove the stroke and make it gray and by the color definition this is now a pocketing cut to recess this text into my workpiece one last exciting design feature is the custom anchor that was introduced to shaper origin with the recent inverness update and if you want to read up on what that feature does i'll leave a link in the description for our design that means we have to create a red triangle so i'm going to turn my help grid snapping back on zoom in a bit i'm just going to select this point this one and this one and make sure the shape is closed the important things to consider with this triangle are that it has one 90 degree angle down here and that the two sides that are not the hypotenuse differ in length so we have a short one and a long one and now all we need to do is to color this triangle red and remove the stroke ta-da that's our custom anchor and if i have my snapping set up correctly then i can just grab this bottom left corner and snap it to whatever point of interest i'd like to in my design after you've finished your design and double check that all of your stroke and fill colors are correct it's time to save i'm just going to quickly declutter this design what i like to do before saving is to select all of the shapes in my design by pressing ctrl a and then either choosing edit resize page to selection or pressing ctrl shift r and as you can see this changes the size of our page to the relevant shapes in our design the shaper origin does not care about the size of this page this is just aesthetic in inkscape it just cares about our shapes and draws its own rectangular bounding box around the shapes which is why the custom anchor can be extremely useful sometimes if you don't want to position your design at the corners of that automatic bounding box that the shaper origin draws around all of the shapes in your design now i can choose file save or press ctrl s and the important thing here is to choose plain svg from this list so not inkscape svg but just a plain svg that will also improve the compatibility of your file to the shaper origin and there you go congratulations you just exported your first cuttable svg file for shaper origin i hope you were able to follow along with this tutorial and are now able to creatively design whatever you'd like in inkscape if there's anything i explain too quickly or not detailed enough then please write it in the comments and i'll try my best to answer all questions you may have in the comments section this concludes the beginner's part of my inkscape tutorial if you want to learn some advanced features such as modifying files that you imported from other cad software or automatically rounding all of the corners in your designs then stay tuned for the next video thank you for watching and have fun designing see you soon bye [Music] bye

Channel: BodgedButWorks

Views: 10,157

Keywords: bodgedbutworks, diy, project, woodworking, electronics, bodged but works, 3D Printing, Software, CAD, Programming, Mechanical, Engineering, inkscape, shaper, origin, cnc, tutorial, beginner, svg, design

Id: BGnVt29NEG8

Length: 31min 22sec (1882 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 12 2021