Learn 6 Powerful Inkscape Path Effects in One Design

in this video we'll learn six inkscape path Effects by using them to create this adjustable jellyfish-like creature to start creating the jellyfish's body I'll go to the circle as an ellipsis tool and create an ellipse I'll make the ellipse black for now and I'm going to lower its opacity to 50 to make it easier to see everything all right now I want to cut off the bottom half of the ellipse to do this I'll go to the squares and rectangles tool and create a rectangle that covers the ellipse's bottom half now I'll grab the select tool and select both objects then go up to the path menu and choose difference connects I want to round off these Corners to do this I'll use the corners path effect but first if I go to the node tool I might have some extra nodes here above the corner nodes these will get in the way when I try to round the corners so I need to delete them to do this I'll select one of the extra nodes hold shift and select the other one and press delete all right and an inkscape 1.3 with the node tool active we can easily apply the Corner's pad effect to a selected object by clicking this button up here that says add Corners LPE we now get these white circular handles near the nodes and we can use these to change the rounding of the corner at that node we can also select multiple nodes and round them together now if I open up the path effects dialog by going to path and choosing path effects we can see in here that the path has a Corner's path effect attached to it and the pet effects dialog we can adjust the rounding at all of the nodes using this radius setting we can also change the corner type down here fill it as the default inverse fillet inverts the routing chamfer chops off the corners and we can use this chamfer step setting to change the look of it and finally inverse chamfer inverts the result we can also cycle between the corner types at a particular node by holding down control and clicking one of its handles I want to round all of the corners so I'll go back to using fillet it also select these two bottom nodes again and round them some more and I can go to the select tool and resize everything if I want all right next I want to create the tentacles I'll use the pen tool for this now as we'll see in a bit it's important that we create the first tentacle path horizontally so first I'll click somewhere down here then while holding down control to keep the path horizontal I'll click over here now press enter to finish the path all right and I want to be able to adjust the width of this path at different points particularly by making one end wider than the other end for this I'll use the power stroke path effect so with the path selected I can come over here to the top of the path effects dialog and I can either click the arrow here to show all the path effects or I can just start typing power stroke in the Box here and click it when it pops up okay so at the moment the path still looks the same but if we start increasing the width multiplier setting here we can thicken up The Path and we can see that by default the path is tapered at both ends now if we go to the node tool we have these three purple Diamond handles one near each of the nodes and one at the center these are called stroke width control points and we can move them along the path and use them to adjust the width of the path near that point back over in the path effects dialog we have the start cap and end cap settings these affect the shape of the path at both the start and the end points zero width gives us the tapered look and we can also go with butts Peak round and square I'm going to set start cap to round and I'll leave end cap on zero width connects I want to be able to bend this path in various ways so that is not so rigid and actually looks like a tentacle we'll use the bin pet effect for this and it's the reason we had to create this path horizontally to demonstrate why I'll create a rectangle down here and I'm going to make it go horizontally across the canvas now I'm going to add the bend path effect to it all right now under Bend path here if I click this button that says edit on canvas it switches me to the node tool and now I can see this green line going horizontally to the center of the rectangle if I click and drag this line I can bend the rectangle I can also move around these nodes at each end of the line and I can use the handles to further adjust the bending another thing I can do is double click the green line to add another node to it and split it into segments and I can adjust the bending of each segment and finally I can use the width setting in the path effects dialog to adjust the width along the entire shape all right now the reason is best to First create an object horizontally if we plan to add the bin path effect to it is that the bin path is always created horizontally along the center of the object if I rotate the rectangle and show the bin path again we can see that the bent path rotated along with it however if I instead create a vertical rectangle add the bend path effect to it and show the bin path it spans the narrow part of the rectangle this could be what we want but in most cases probably not there actually is a fix to this which is to check the original path this vertical box in the path effects dialog then adjust everything to try to get the original shape bag this works okay with simple shapes like rectangles but not so much with complex ones which is why I recommend just creating the shapes horizontally to begin with all right with all of that out of the way I'll delete these rectangles and I'm going to add the bent path effect to the tentacle path now the path has both the power stroke and the bin path effects attached to it I can now make the path vertical by clicking it to show its rotation handles grabbing one of the corner handles holding down control to snap the rotation angle and rotating it clockwise until it's vertical now I can position it on the body click it again to get back to the scale handles and adjust the height a bit I'm not actually going to bend this path yet because this jellyfish is going to be my base jellyfish I'm going to create duplicates of it and make various adjustments on the duplicates okay now I want to duplicate the tentacle path a few times to do so I'll right click it and choose duplicate and move it to the right now I can duplicate and move this one and I'll repeat the process for a total of five tentacles all right next I want to create various spots on the body for this I'll go to the circles Ellipsis tool click and drag in here and hold down control to create a perfect circle I'll raise the opacity up to 100 percent then I'll go to the select tool duplicate the circle move it somewhere else and adjust the size while holding down control I'll make about seven or eight of these connects I'm going to place all the spots and all of the tentacles into a single group to do this I'll select everything but the body object then I'll right click and choose group these are now treated as a single object all right now I want to copy this group into my clipboard by right clicking it and choosing copy this is important for the Clone original path effect which is coming up next I'm now going to duplicate the group by right clicking it and choosing duplicate and I'm going to use the path effects dialog to add clone original to the duplicate what clone original does is it allows us to clone certain properties of an object or group of objects to use it we first need to have whatever object or group that we want to clone copied into the clipboard then next to linked item here we click the link to item button this group is now a clone of the original group Peter under it because we copied the original group into the clipboard and if I select the original group I now have this button in the path effects dialog that I can click to easily select the Clone alright and by default clone original will clone the original object's shape including its lpes which are as path effects we can also choose to not clone the object's shape at all to only clone a spiral or B spline path effects if it has any or to clone just the object's shape without its path effects in our case we want to leave it on with lpes we can also choose to clone certain attributes of the object like its style or transform or certain CSS properties like the fill or opacity what we want to do is clone the original objects transform so that if we move or resize one of the objects in the original group the results will also be applied to the same object in the Clone group an easy way to clone the original group's transform is to uncheck allow transforms here this forces the Clone group to always remain at the same position as the original group if we try to move the clone group as soon as we release the mouse it moves back to the original group's position now a cool thing about the Clone original path effect is that we can actually add more path effects to the Clone group separate from the original object's path effects let's go with offset here with the offset path effect if we go to the node tool we get this orange circular handle somewhere on the object or group which we can use to offset it and because we're not cloning the original group's opacity we can lower the opacity of the Clone group so that we can better see how much of an offset we're giving it now when we use offset on objects with sharp points the ends might get cut off like this this actually doesn't matter for us because we're going to be cutting out the offset in a bit but just in case you want to change this we can for example change the join setting here to rounded all right to finish up the jellyfish we're going to cut the Clone group out of the body objects because the Clone group is offset this will have the effect of adding some spacing around all the spots and the tentacles to do this let's copy the Clone group into the clipboard by right clicking it and choosing copy now let's go to the select tool and grab the body object and I set the Boolean operation path effect to it Boolean operation allows us to perform path effects between two objects or groups non-destructively we can view all the possible operations that we can perform by clicking the operation setting option here now the reason we need to use the Boolean operation path effect instead of just performing a normal path operation From the Path menu is that these operations will flatten the path effects of the objects this will cause us to not be able to adjust the object's path effects settings anymore we want our jellyfish to be fully adjustable which is why we need to use the Boolean operation path effects alright and in order to use Boolean operation we need to have an object or group copied into our clipboard we should still have the Clone group here copied into the clipboard so now next to operand path here we need to click the link to item button the default operation of Union combines the body object with the Clone group what we want to do instead is cut the Clone group out of the body objects we can do this by changing the operation to difference alright now at the moment if I click one of the spots or tentacles it will select the Clone group as we can see in the path effects dialog we want to be able to select the original group underneath it so let's click the lower to bottom button up here now if we click in here it will select the original group okay now to make some adjustments let's first select all of the jellyfish parts duplicate them and bring them over here now let's deselect everything then we can enter into the group here either by right-clicking it and choosing enter group or by double clicking it now we can select the individual objects if we transform one of these objects such as by moving or resizing one of the spots the objects in the Clone group will adjust accordingly and if we select one of the tentacles we can click the edit on canvas button for its been path effect and bend it in various ways and we can double click the bend path to add extra nodes if we add a node to a Bend path and it gives us a corner node indicated by a diamond we can click the make selected node smooth button up here okay so in this lesson we learned how to use the corners Power Stroke Bend clone original offset and Boolean operation path effects thank you very much for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: Sweater Cat Designs

Views: 10,830

Keywords: vector, graphic design, digital art, 2d, video game, poseable, flat design, animate, animation, rigging

Id: 5T29yMP1BC0

Length: 13min 19sec (799 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 01 2023