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

hi and welcome to part two of my inkscape tutorial for advanced users and shaper origin enthusiasts in my first beginner video we went over all the features of inkscape and what exactly you need to do to create a cuttable file for your shaper origin in this video i'd like to go a bit more in depth and talk about some advanced features that can help speed up your workflow and help you realize more complex designs let's start right out with the first topic which is importing files from other cad software into inkscape i'll be using this design for a laptop riser that i made in catia it's made out of five parts i found the dxf file format to be simple to work with and it imports well into inkscape so that's what i'm going to be using the first thing i have to do is to export a 2d drawing with all of the parts from my cad software and export it as a dxf and open that in inkscape when i drag and drop the dxf file into inkscape i get this dialog where i can change the scale and other settings but i'm just going to leave it as is confirm everything and there we go right now all of these shapes are inside a group and we don't want that so i'm going to select everything right click and select ungroup and now as you can see the individual lines are highlighted now my cad software exports everything every line every arc as an individual element although your cad software might handle this a bit better you might still stumble upon this effect in files you get from friends or download from the internet so what i'm going to show you might still be interesting for you and what i have to do is to join in this case these eight lines four lines and four quarters of circles to get a closed shape because as i mentioned in the beginner tutorial the shaper origin needs closed shapes to be able to recognize what is an inside and what is an outside cut and my workflow for rejoining these shapes is as follows first it's necessary to check if there are duplicate elements this sometimes happens if in the cad software two lines are directly behind each other in this view you can check for this by moving your element and if there's nothing behind it you're good to go and can press ctrl z and continue with the joining if there are duplicate elements you should remove them because otherwise if we select them all then the joining won't work properly the next step is to select all of the elements that you want to combine to one shape i've already shown how to do this with a rectangle selection another method would be to select an element and while holding the shift key select the other ones and the last method is to check your objects tree over here so normally these elements are exported kind of in an order from your cad software so they're probably close to each other in this list and you can select all of the eight elements that we need right here in this list that is especially useful if the rectangle selection doesn't work for example because there are additional elements inside of here that are supposed to be another shape then you can just select them all so use one of these methods to select all of the elements then we are going to press f2 to get into the node selection menu then i'm going to press ctrl a to select all of the nodes and the last step will be to press this button here join selected nodes in the top toolbar now if i go back to the standard selection mode with f1 you can see we have a single shape and what's also new is that you can now give this shape a fill so if i go into the fill and stroke menu as you can see inkscape now recognizes this as a closed shape and i can actually give it a color this won't work for the other shapes because they're single elements and i try to fill them nothing will happen because inkscape has no understanding of what's inside and what's outside there are situations though where this method doesn't work i've had one project so far where the outline was too complex and i wasn't able to get a close shape in inkscape and for that i have a kind of botched solution if you check your left toolbar there's this fill bounded areas icon if i select that and then click in one of these shapes remember this is still not joined so it's individual elements but inkscape still knows where the boundaries are of course even though they're not joined and now we can fill the surface this isn't all too precise so if i zoom in you can see inkscape does its best to match the outline but there's a gap and you're gonna have to adjust the nodes a little bit in my opinion that's okay for woodworking a little bit of tolerance is allowed and it's saved me in that one situation where i wasn't able to get that close shape otherwise just remember to delete the pre-existing lines because of course you don't want overlapping shapes but rather just this new red and blue one let's talk a bit about the options in the path menu we've already used the object to path command in the beginner's tutorial to translate a text and inkscape text into a path that the shaper origin will be able to cut let's check out this next option stroke to path we have a closed shape this shape has a red fill and a blue or now black outline okay cool now i'm going to increase the thickness of the stroke remember this is irrelevant for cutting because the origin ignores the stroke width and now imagine i realize i want to cut this stroke the black parts not just recess or pocket cut the red area i'm just going to remove that but cut on the inside of that stroke and on the outside and remember right now it's like just one very fat line what we can do is select our entire shape now and select stroke to path inkscape now turns this single line into two lines one on this side one on this side and the same for this line so if i press f2 you can see there's more vertices here now and if you check your fill and stroke menu you'll notice that stroke is now suddenly turned off and only fill is turned on if i additionally add a stroke and decrease the width you can see the stroke is now on other sides of this part keep this tool in mind if you want to turn the stroke of a design you made into a cuttable path the next awesome feature in this path menu is called trace bitmap to be able to use that properly i'm going to import an image you might remember this file from my laptop tray video it's a design my sister made and she drew it with adding onto a white piece of paper what we want to do is convert this pixel-based image into a vector graphic so paths that we'll be able to cut it's good to use high contrast images such as this one because there's a good separation between white so stuff we don't need and black the stuff we want to convert into svgs i'm going to select this image and choose path trace bitmap if this window appears in your browser right here you can always right click on a tab and choose move tab to new window to get a bit more space now i'm just going to leave the settings as they are and click update and you can already see a preview and it's looking pretty good because as i said the image has a high contrast and a good separation between white and black so inkscape is able to tell what we want to have converted pretty easily and if not you could modify these settings to improve the visibility of your edges i'm going to click apply and close this window and it looks as if nothing's changed but if i drag the selection away here and press f2 you can see these are now vector graphic shapes and i can modify the individual nodes now i can delete the original image i don't need it anymore and now i'm able to modify this to for example remove these weird corners here which are artifacts from the conversion and to ensure that my cutting bit depending on its diameter has enough space to get everywhere more on that modification later the next options in the path menu are boolean operators that means they control how two shapes interact i'm going to create two rectangles i'm going to change the color to green on this one for visibility right now they are two individual shapes what i'm going to do is to select this one press and hold the shift key select the second one then in the path menu i can for example choose union now they are a combined shape so these edges of the green rectangle are now gone if i click f2 check the vertices then you can see it's now a brand new shape with the combined area of both of the rectangles when they were overlapping i'm going to press ctrl z to get back another possibility would be to use the intersection command that gives us a new shape where the old shapes overlapped i encourage you to play around a bit with these operators because they enable you to make complex new shapes by applying boolean operators to your existing ones i'd like to show you one more that i find pretty interesting after selecting the two rectangles i'm going to choose division looks weird but actually what used to be a single red rectangle has now turned into two shapes that were separated where the green rectangle intersected i find this can really speed up your workflow because instead of for example having to draw this large red one with individual points as a polygon i can just use these two rectangles position them exactly where i want them to be using the grid or coordinates like i showed you in the beginner's tutorial video and then create this more complex new shape in a short amount of time with exact measurements moving forward in the path menu you can find the inset and the outset command those are great for applying erosion or dilation to your shape so making it larger or smaller by a set amount that we define in the properties dialog at the beginning of the beginner's tutorial so you can change how much these effects are applied if i select this rectangle and i'm going to use the shortcut so control opening bracket then you can see it gets smaller by 0.1 millimeters in this case and that for example is really great for our vectorized image here because i can select everything and press ctrl and the opening bracket and as you can see everything just gets smaller or larger rather than having to modify every single node here for example to make room for your cutting bit in these white regions then this command is just awesome the simplify command in the path menu can be used to reduce the number of nodes around the shape as you can see with this shape i pressed f2 to make the nodes visible and there's quite a lot of them especially in these straight parts that aren't really necessary and by using the simplify command or pressing ctrl l i can gradually reduce the number of nodes on this shape and in my opinion inkscape does a pretty good job at preserving the actual shape of the outline while still reducing the number of points before we talk about the rounding tools i'd like to show you the align and distribute menu that you can find in the objects tab this menu can help you align objects relative to each other if i want to get this red one centered horizontally inside the green one i can just select both and click on the center icon you were able to see the green one has moved if i select them in a different order now the red one moves you can change this behavior in the drop down up here so right now it's at last selected which means that the last selected shape will remain stationary and all the other ones just like this one as well and this and now the green one the green one will stay and the rest will align horizontally this also works for aligning it vertically and there's also neat tools to align objects with a defined spacing so if for example i want the centers of these three shapes to have the exact same distance i'm going to select them and choose the option distribute centers equidistantly horizontally and now it did exactly that we could also do it with the same spacings between the edges that would look like this and that's cool if you have for example a couple of holes in a design and you want them spaced equidistantly you could do that like so and now i want them all on the same horizontal level so i'm going to choose this tada you might have noticed the arrange option in the objects tab right here and that can be used to for example make a grid out of your designs so if i want these four shapes to be in a 2x2 grid with a certain spacing that i can set down here for example 20 millimeters i guess that's great for like groups of holes where you want an exact spacing and you don't want to move them all one by one you can use the arrange menu now let's talk about automatically rounding corners why is this important well usually your cutting bits are round that means depending on the diameter you will always have a radius on corners allow me to demonstrate on this green rectangle so if you want to make an outside cut and cut this green surface out of your wood you can just go around that with your cutting bit everything's fine but if you want to make a hole in the shape of this rectangle that won't be possible without additional tools that's just the nature of rotating cutting bits quick and dirty i can add a rounding here and if i for example have a six millimeter diameter cutting bit then i would have to consider a radius of three millimeters so this is the closest i can get to a perfect 90 degree corner this was easy for the rectangle of course because there's this rounding command but for more complex shapes such as this one or for demonstrational purposes i shall make one with some really sharp turns it isn't that easy for this shape because you can't just like round the four corners of the rectangle you would have to kind of modify this by hand and of course you don't want to do this if you have thousands of vertices so i'd like to show you the workflow that i use to accomplish this task the first and very important step is to simplify our shape of course for this one that i just made it has these very defined vertices here but as mentioned before if you import svgs from other people or if you digitized it from a photograph then there's quite likely a lot of redundant points in the in the middle of these lines and do that by choosing the path simplify command or pressing ctrl l and doing that as long as it takes so that the nodes kind of seem more organized to you and that there aren't like five nodes on this short segment of a corner because it will likely disrupt our corner command next we are going to select the entire shape and open the path effects menu by choosing path path effects now on the right we can see this empty list i'm going to choose the plus icon there's a lot of path effects as you can see i'm going to choose this corners fillet slash chamfer all right and you can already see it's doing something now let's tweak this first i'm going to choose my unit so millimeters choose inches if you will and the method can be set to force arc or force bezier that changes the behavior of this corner rounding so you can either join two lines that used to have a sharp corner with a segment of a circle that would be force arc or with kind of a smooth maybe parabolic bezier curve that would be the force bezier option then i'm going to enter the cutting bit diameter here i think this is an error in inkscape and that the word radius should be diameter here correct me if i'm wrong but if i check this with a circle i'm going to make it six by six millimeters large and i'm also going to remove the stroke so we can just see that pure six millimeter circle then i think this setting right now is for a six millimeter diameter aka three millimeter radius cutter because if i change this to a three millimeter radius as you can see there's no way a six millimeter cutter will get in there so i think that's a bug but correct me if i'm wrong and then you can choose a few other settings but i've never used them so far i'm going to set this back to 6 millimeters and as you can see it's rounded well kind of in this case there was probably something wrong with our original shape so i'm going to deactivate the corners path effect and guess what if we zoom in here there is just one vertex here so so that's fine if there were multiple really close to each other that could be a reason but also the curve magnitude at this point is kind of twisted so i'm going to untangle this a bit and now reactivate the effect and this looks much better and we could still tweak this by leaving the effect turned on and moving these two greenish points to increase the rounding diameter the last feature i'd like to show you is hershey text so usually if you write some letters over here i'm going to scale them up a bit and as mentioned in the previous video we'll have to convert this into a path to be able to cut it the thing is each one of these letters is a closed shape now this might be what you want you could for example set this to an online cut by removing the fill and setting the stroke to gray and now cut this with a v-cut engraving bit but what might also be what you want is that each of these letters is one single line so if i stay with this e for example this way and then around the corner and that's it and we can achieve this by creating a new text now i'm pressing f1 and selecting the text and then under extensions text we can select hershey text hershey text does exactly what we want it converts each letter to one or multiple single thin lines you can check out the different styles of hershey text on the shaper website i'll be linking to that below and i'm just going to choose nyxish whatever that is and i can also do a live preview down here i'm going to click apply now if i press f2 so you don't have to convert the text to a path now using path object to path the hershey plugin has already done that for you and as you can see it's like yeah single lines and to get a bit closer to what it might look like i'm going to select it and increase the stroke style shaper origin ignores that so to simulate a 1.5 millimeter diameter cutting bit in this situation this is what it might look like later on so in my opinion an interesting new perspective on how to work with text those were the tips i had for you in the advanced tutorial i'd like to show you one or two applications so um you can see what all the commands we went over might be useful for i'm going to add an ellipse and remove the stroke and set the fill to gray then i'm going to add a text scale that up now selecting the text and holding shift and the ellipse i can go into our align distribute menu now it's perfectly centered in both directions what i want to do is to kind of recess that text in a special way so i want to have a flat surface of my wooden board then i want the gray ellipse to be recessed and i want the text to not be recessed so have the same height and be co-planar with the rest of my wooden board the thing is if i just export it like this i mean of course i would convert the text to a path first but still right now the shaper origin sees the ellipse and the text as two individual shapes or groups of shapes and it doesn't recognize while you're pocketing that ellipse that there's a text that it's not supposed to hit with a milling bit right now the text consists of individual letter paths but they are in a group which is why if i f1 select them i always have all the letters so i'm going to right click and choose ungroup and now i could basically highlight everything and choose path difference for example you'll notice that it didn't quite work the way i intended and that's because we have to kind of regroup the text but not in a group but to combine all the individual paths of the text into one single path and we can do this by selecting just the text not the ellipse and choose path combine now it looks just like before but it's actually one combined path and now what we can do is select the ellipse hold shift select the text difference we've basically just subtracted the combined text path from the ellipse you can take a look at the nodes and observe that they are now actually part of the ellipse by doing it like this the shaper origin will actually recognize the gray surface as a cutting zone and will not cut into or over the text and leave it standing to achieve the desired effect lastly a trick concerning cursive text so let's write barge but works i wonder how this is going to look in cursive and i just have to find a style that is cursive so selecting it no no no no no a few moments later i'm looking for a cursive text where the individual characters are overlapping okay how about this one i'm going to convert it to a path and ungroup it by right-clicking and choosing ungroup the letters are actually overlapping just by a tiny bit but they are and if you were to cut this then of course every individual letter is a closed shape which i can demonstrate by filling this letter with a different color so as you can see it's detached from the rest i don't want my cutter to pass through here through this line connecting the letter g when i'm cutting this one so you might have guessed it already what we can do here after converting the text to a path and ungrouping it is to select everything and select path union if i press f2 everything's actually connected and one single path or shape so changing the fill color now leads to everything having that color so if you're working with cursive text or other situations where you notice the shaper origin wants to cut through places between shapes where you don't want it to cut then you can use this union or combine method to get everything into one path one layer and the shaper origin will correctly detect the outside and the inside of that new combined shape that's it for today i hope you were able to learn something in the advanced tutorial if that was a bit too much or too fast then check out the beginner's tutorial and if i left any questions open or went over some of the things too fast then feel free to write it in the comments and i'll try to get back to you under the video as always thank you so much for watching and i hope to see you again in one of our upcoming videos bye [Music] you

Channel: BodgedButWorks

Views: 3,717

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

Id: 3E0LYMiIvUs

Length: 24min 32sec (1472 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 12 2021