Inkscape Walkthrough: Applying Clipping Mask to Shapes

hey everybody c rogers here from the inkscape project and today we've got a question from andre andre is asking about clipping masks and how to apply them to the geometry inside of them so when you have a clipping mask around a group of objects parts of those objects are hidden so how do you make those how do you make that clipping mask instead of hide how do you make it cut down the the object stack so we're going to go over a little bit about how to do that the reasoning behind that in this case is because adobe illustrator doesn't seem to like the clipping masks that are coming out of inkscape we're going to try and figure out why that might be the case i know that illustrator does handle clipping masks but maybe they're a little bit more complex than illustrator is used to so we'll have a look into that and also show you how to make clipping masks cut using path operations so without further ado let's get into it i'm just going to copy this image here and we've got the original file here so uh you know we're just going to use this um turn off our snapping and make this larger so we can see all right so you can see that our original black shape here we've got all this extra bit the clipping mask isn't really working let's have a look at it we've got this shape here you can see that it's clipped at the bottom we're just going to right click and release that clip to see what we've got okay we've got this is so the white thing here is our clipping mask and this is the clip the clip shape in here when we highlight this we can see that it's a group of two objects so the first thing we're going to do is ungroup that and now we've got two objects of type group okay so we've got groups of groups being used as a clipping mask now inkscape can handle that um but i wouldn't expect anything other than escape to be able to handle that so we're going to simplify that first of all uh because um where are we going to need these to be one path to use them to uh difference the shape here uh the black shape with this to make it one one shape that's just a path this would also help in the case of using it as a clipping mask to to not have so many groups in it for for printing and other things because printers can get kind of depending on the software they're using to print it might it might not work out very well so the first thing we're going to do is ungroup it again so now we've got two objects selected to type group again so rather than go back up to object and ungroup a lot uh we're going to use the um the hotkey which is shift control g for ungroup and we're just going to hit shift control g over and over until we don't see any more groups you can see now it's seven objects selected of type group now it's okay seven objects of type path okay so now we've got our all of our paths now we can go to path and union these together because we just want to use this whole shape to cut the geometry underneath it and just in case we've got more than one shape to cut we're going to edit copy and select our other shape and path intersection because we want to make a shape look like a clipping path it's you wanted to take the intersection between the path and the clipping shape so we're going to use intersection and as you can see that worked really well now we've got this nice clean cut shape from our original clipping path that we were using before so now it looks like it was just one object that needed to be cut which was just that black if there was another shape though like say uh you had like um i don't know like a red shape here uh i'll turn that up all the way say you had that black and also this red shape maybe it looks you know oh also make sure that you're not on the yeah so if we send this down the object uh lower or use the page down button just to lower down our object stack to where it's underneath the text but on top of our black shape we're going to give this like a red nose just to pretend like that was the design so if we want to use that same clipping shape to cut that now what we can do since we copied it earlier is we can go to edit and paste in place and that will paste another copy of that clipping shape on top of there and again we're just going to use that and path to [Music] intersect now we've got that piece there with our red bit as well so that's the process um basically you take your whatever shape that you were used uh using to clip the shapes um you break it apart uh if it's groups um ungroup as many times as you can and then union all of those together which is what inkscape does anyway um before you uh before you set the clip it is it's just going to mash all those shapes together to use as a clipping shape so we're just doing that manually yep so there's that i'll get rid of that okay yeah so um i've got that process down we'll apply it to this other one here we've got this shape which is also clipped you can see so we'll you can see it's got this piece here that's overlapping so we're releasing the clip on that uh now we've got our clip shape here we're going to edit copy oh well actually this one is also clipped so let's undo that edit undo whoops yeah we'll go to before move don't need that um let's try this oh no that's just group of two objects clipped okay so object oh sorry um right click and release clip okay so now we're going to hold down the shift key and click on the shape to just select our clipping shape you can see that this shape is also clipped as well the so the shape that we were using to clip this shape is also clipped it's interesting let's try and release clip on that okay so it looks to me like uh the orange shape was clipped to this shape first and then kind of duplicated to use as a clipping shape which is probably why illustrator is getting a little bit confused with this one because there's a lot of clipping happening here nested clipping so in this case we don't really want to keep that orange bit in the background that's an entirely different shape so now we have a group of two objects as our clipping shape that's fine object ungroup okay and again we've got groups so let's ctrl shift g to ungroup again and again and again there we go so i got eight objects of type path all right excellent now path union and then we'll select well oh yeah don't forget to copy edit copy just in case we need to clip two two objects or more and set clip yeah that looks good sorry not set clip try this again uh path and intersection oh that's interesting not even plugged in i have to pause this for a second and uh save my laptop from dying okay there we go now that we have power again uh i think we will okay so yeah we now have two objects of type path oh we've got a group still so something is still a group what is it still a group that's a path okay so this is a group of two objects all right oh i hope they're they're not all they're not all different shapes let's see what happens when we control shift g to ungroup that oh okay that's fine yeah two objects would type group still four objects to type group uh okay there we go now it's a path so this is all one path now that's good we'll take this one and try that again with our path intersection there we go all right excellent so um that looks like it worked okay we've got that clipped now although it looks like we have some sort of an interesting i guess this turned orange and we probably don't want it to be orange looks like looks like to me oh that's just how it turned out i forgot i forgot okay no all right so we'll assume that this is this is correct if if not you know let me know we'll figure out how to how to how to fix it okay so if we take this over here um anything else all that looks good on the bottom these look good so all these look fine that looks fine okay we've got this piece here i think that's the last piece that we need to cut for our project to be done so again we're going to right click release clip shift click on our clipped shape so we just have our our clipping shape which is a group of three objects we're going to object ungroup and we're gonna control shift g to ungroup more until we don't have any more groups in the bar down here you can see now okay we got five objects type path that's good now path union those together and we're going to copy that and uh path intersection all right excellent so that's good um yeah that looks right okay cool and if we double click on this it should be yep all the geometry is good so excellent and that in a nutshell is how to both apply clipping masks to make geometry and also maybe how to clean up your clipping masks so that illustrator doesn't throw fit anyway i hope you enjoyed this little walk through and talk to you guys later bye

Channel: Freedom Designed

Views: 164

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Id: -c3dSHa5SVc

Length: 13min 0sec (780 seconds)

Published: Sat May 15 2021