Inkscape's Equivalent Of The Blend Tool In Illustrator

in adobe illustrator there's a really handy tool called the blend tool which allows you to make lots of copies of objects and blend them together in creative ways inkscape doesn't have such a tool but it does come with a couple of extensions that when used in tandem can mimic the function of illustrator's blend tool in today's tutorial i'll be showing you how [Music] so getting us started here in inkscape the first thing we're going to have a look at is the scatter extension which allows you to take a single object and repeat it along a path as many times as you'd like in order to use this extension we're going to need a path to place our object on so for this demonstration i'm going to be creating a spiral you can create whatever path you'd like this is just the example i'm going to use for this lesson if you'd like to follow along with what i'm doing just go ahead and pause the video and input these values up here into the tool settings for the spiral tool and then we'll be good to get started once that's done i'm going to click and drag on the canvas like that to create my spiral and that right there represents the path that my object is going to follow so now i have to actually create the object for this demonstration i'll just be using a simple circle i'm going to grab the circles and ellipses tool click and drag on the canvas and then hold ctrl to ensure that it's a perfectly round circle like that and i'm going to give this a gradient just to help demonstrate this effect a little better i'm going to make this a solid fill color first of something like pink and then i'm going to apply a gradient so let me grab the fill and stroke menu which is located up here or you can press ctrl shift and f on the keyboard to access it and up here under the fill tab i'm just going to click this button over here that says linear gradient and as you can see right here we now have a linear gradient on this object so this half of the circle is pink i want to make this half a different color so let me click on this handle right here and i'm going to change this color to something else i'm going to use a lighter shade of blue like that and now i'm going to take the handles of this gradient and just move this like this i'm going to put this one up here i'm going to hold ctrl to lock it onto the axis so we have a nice vertical gradient going like that now what i'm going to do oh by the way to zoom in and out hold ctrl roll up and down the mouse wheel so now what i'm going to do is i'm going to grab the selection tool and now in order to make this object follow along this path we have to make sure that this object is positioned above the path now since we created the path first and then the object second we don't have to worry about this this is already positioned above the path here but i just needed to point that out in case you're using this extension in other ways and you can't figure out why it works the object always has to be positioned above the path like that okay and you can change the positioning over here using these up and down you can lower objects raise objects see right now the path is above the object which is no good we want this to be on top okay so with that in place let me select both of these objects and i'm going to go to extensions generate from path scatter okay so now the the settings i'm going to use here as you can see follow path orientation check stretch spaces to fit skeleton link uh length check spaces between copies i'm going to start off with negative 10 and then we'll take it from there normal offset we're gonna leave that at zero zero cloned and randomly we're gonna leave everything as it is here and what i'm gonna do once i have negative 10 put in here i'm gonna i'm gonna enable the live preview and it's going to show you what happens here it's going to show you the object being repeated along the path now if you notice there's lots of spacing between these objects we want the spacing to be decreased so we can have more objects so it looks more like a solid line in order to do that we're going to have to decrease this number here the spaces between copies i'm going to start off with negative 15. we started out with negative 10 i'm going to go in increments of 5. so i'm going to go down to negative 15 now and see how that looks okay so that looks a little better now the reason why i'm going in increments of five is because if you go too far too much it's actually going to lock up this uh it's gonna lock up the extension and it's not gonna work you'll see here in just a minute let me try negative 20 now okay that's looking a lot better i'm going to go a little further just for demonstration purposes here let's try negative 25. and this is what happens right here you get this error message this means that you've gone too far for the for your object and there's no more like this is as much as the extension can do now this morning message is a good thing here because a few years ago i actually made a video demonstrating how to use this extension in an older version of inkscape and once you go too far what it used to do is it used to crash your system and you had to restart everything now they've added this uh fix in there that stops it from crashing so we're going to go ahead and click ok and we're going to go back to 20 and we're going to try 21 instead okay that looks good let's try 22. and that's too far so it looks like 21 is the max i'm going to set it to 21. and once i'm finished i'm going to click ok or apply and then close and there you go it generated that object right there kind of like how the blend tool works in adobe illustrator okay now if you zoom in on this you can see it just consists of lots of tiny individual circles you may be able to see some of the color banding in there that's because this is a bunch of individual circles okay but if you zoom out it looks nice and fluid nice and smooth like that so now let's have a look at the other extension in inkscape that allows you to perform some of the functions that the blend tool does in illustrator this would be the interpolate tool so to demonstrate what interpolate does let me create a text object i'm going to grab my text tool i'm going to click on the canvas right here and i'm going to type blend in all caps i'm going to triple click the text to highlight it and i'm going to change the font by clicking on the text editor up here and the font i'm using for this demonstration is called league league gothic which is right there click apply and there we go let me get out of this menu because it otherwise slows the system down let me grab the selection tool now let me make this larger hold ctrl while i'm scaling to ensure that it maintains the aspect ratio and i'm going to put this copy over here maybe i'll make this a little smaller i want to make this a different color i want to make this yellow and what i want to do is change this from a text object to an actual path otherwise this is not going to work this interpolate extension it only works on objects that are paths so to convert this to a path i'll go to path object to path and now i need to ungroup it i'll go to object on group and then i'll unify it all together by going to path union and now i'm going to duplicate this object by right clicking it going to duplicate and i'll make this one bigger i'm holding ctrl while i'm scaling here to maintain the aspect ratio and i'll move this one down here and i'm going to change this to a different color i'll go with pink and now i'm going to select both of these objects at the same time go to extensions generate from path and interpolate now the settings i'll be using here as you can see the exponent is one interpolation steps this is the number of copies that will be created between these two i'm going to start out with five and then i'll take it from there and these settings as you can see here we want to leave these settings as you see on my screen and once you're ready click live preview and as you can see it took the two objects and created five copies of them based on their properties now as you can see these copies they range in size they go from large to small as these two objects did and then the color transitions as well as you can see there so if i could actually i could actually increase this from five to something like 10 and then you end up with something like that or i could even go as far as 20 and then you end up with something like that go a little further 30 now it's looking more fluid like that and unlike the other extension i don't think this one has a break off point where it locks up and closes i think you could go infinitely with this so that's 40. here's how 50 looks and there you go i think you should get the idea let me bring this back down to something a little more reasonable like 10. click apply and then close and then once you're finished as you can see here it created new copies from this so your original copies are still there in place you don't need to make duplicates you don't need to make backup copies because this is going to generate a new copy based on this and if you want to edit this further you can just go to object on group and now as you can see this consists of a bunch of individual objects that were generated using that extension so i think that should do it for this tutorial that is how you can go about working around a lack of the blend tool in inkscape if you found this lesson useful then consider checking out my inkscape master class it's a collection of over 60 videos where i go over all of the tools and features in inkscape and i explain what they are and demonstrate how they work kind of like how i did in this video we even have a private community where you can ask questions and get help from me anytime you want and best of all there's no monthly membership fees you just pay 17 one time and you're in for life i'll have some information about that down below if you want to check that out as always thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 26,501

Keywords: inkscape blend tool

Id: JBoYes2qls0

Length: 9min 42sec (582 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 13 2022