Lesson 1: Inkscape - Preparing Images for the Plasma Cutter

when we start working with Inkscape trying to prepare things for the plasma cutter first thing you need to do is have an image so you might want to go to the Internet as you open up Google for instance if you go to images let's say we want to find a horse okay now if I look at that none of these horses are gonna work in a plasma cutter so maybe what I need to do is I need to change on my tools I go to my type let's go to clipart instead and find a horse alright well there's a horse there's one of their horses running there's a large one we don't necessarily want and also if you notice down in the side it tells you how big the file is we don't necessarily need that large of a file so let's take this one I'm gonna right mouse and I'm going to save the image as I'm gonna put it on my desktop and I'm just gonna call it simply horse now I've saved an image to my desktop so if I get out of the Internet you can see that now it has been saved right here to my desktop now as I open up Inkscape it'll take a moment for it to boot up once I've done it and you've assuming you have you're in Inkscape on your computer you're going to go ahead now we're going to import that drawing that's kind of important you understand that it's got to be an import not an open you can slide through it until you go okay there's the import to drawing that I want now you can see that this thing is much larger than the sheet of paper i have and we like to use the sheet of paper cut it as an idea oh I see that's an 8 and 1/2 by 11 sheet of paper it gives me an idea how much larger if I'm going to produce something that it's going to be you can also and I want you to make sure you understand this part you see the little lock between the width and the height if you lock that it constrains the proportions up and down if you don't lock that then you can constrain it doesn't constrain the proportions it could distort it so you might just actually want it distorted for one reason or another we'll leave it sitting right there like that if you don't like the way you had it you can always hit the ctrl button and the Z button at the same time and it will undo anything you just did it's the same thing as coming up here and hitting the undo scale or the reduce scale once we've got the image and we're gonna place it in the center so that we can work with it we need to be able to change that image so that the program will work with it the first thing you're going to do is go to path and where it goes down to trace bitmap we're gonna trace the bitmap and it opens up this property inspector and says well is if this is okay we need to turn that image into a bitmap so we're gonna say okay if you have one that has a lot of gray in it you can actually change the threshold up and it'll turn more of the gray into black but for black images this works fine so ahead okay now once I've done that nothing appears to change unless you move it back there like this then you need to highlight the first image hit your delete button and now it is gone now this is an actual bitmap image which we can deal with so the next thing I'm going to do with that image is I'm going to go back up to path and you're going to watch this as that you see I go to object to path I'm not gonna hit yet cuz I want you to watch down here it says path I have 209 nodes in layer 1 so this bitmap has already been put into paths and nodes but I like to hit it anyway and it might tell me oh you haven't got no objects to convert to path click off of and click back on to make sure that you have made a path with nodes now let me show you what nodes are if I click that edit path 2 nodes button over here on the Left I I have 10 property inspector those are nodes and if you don't like the way that they're arranged let me zoom in just a little bit get my magnifying glass and I'm going to go in here let's just zoom in on the top part of this and let's say I want to edit some of these nodes I could change the shape of the ear slightly by editing nodes now on the ends of these will you notice that there are these little handles on the nodes you can actually change the shape of things by changing the orientation of the curve so that's how you work with your node tool but you have to have them in nodes to do that okay now clicking back out there you can use your magnifying tool again and hit - get back to where you can actually work with it you select your tools to be able to move it again or slide it back and forth now that's really important that you be able to convert from an image off the internet into a bitmap and be able to modify the nodes for that next thing we're going to do is we are going to take and add to it a nameplate underneath now you notice that I've got that in red so I want it in black because I'm going to actually combine the two of these now I don't know if you can see this or not but you can actually still see the hoof through that that indicates we have two different layers we need to have it on a similar layer there's another one over there so what I'm going to do is once I've selected this I need to do that object to path as well now you see down below it now has eight nose etc in that layer so we've now been able to convert it to paths now a couple of other things I'm going to ctrl Z and go back one second and take that and start again from a different perspective when you first draw your rectangle you'll notice that there's a little round dot right here if I were to drag that dot down and this dot over I can actually round the size of my corners if I want to make a total oval instead just make them to where they match and now I have an oval shaped object like this now you can go back in at any moment just selecting it like that if I select my nodes tool I can alter it again but it's fastest to do it when you first put it in okay next thing I wanted to show you on this dent if I alter it back so this a little bit more appropriate for what we're gonna do like this if I might be a selector like that you notice the shape of the arrows as I click back and forth with my mouse it changes from straight out so I can alter it like this if you grab it from the corner and the lock is off I can change it any way I want to just width just height or you can accomplish the same thing attaching it to the actual corner and it's faster that way if I constrain my proportions changing any of them like that you can do it like this but grabbing these make sure that the relationship of height to width remains the same but you can still modify the width but it locks that so that you can drag them from the corner all right now I'm going to go ahead and increase the size of that I'm gonna go back to my magnifying tool go back out scale out I'm going to pick up that object and drag it over here where I had it before I'm going to whit the increase its width increase its height oh wait a minute isn't there any easier way to do that well yes there is if you look up here I got this in millimeters I really need to have it in inches now when you first start your document I should have gone over here and my properties inspector using my tool and sometimes this tool that looks like a little wrench maybe up located here but it just looks like a wrench you can also access it from going down to document properties but you set your display units in inches and also your custom units into inches and now it'll always be in this document in inches right here so now this tells me this rectangle that I have selected is almost 18 inches by almost three and a quarter well I don't want it almost I want it exactly 18 so I highlight that and on my numbers on the keypad I hit 18 if I hit the tab button now leave that and we'll go over to the next one of course it actually tapped that I should have tapped twice and now if I want at four inches high just hit four and then hit enter and it creates the exact size that you want now I've still got this thing this one I have not converted into nodes yet you see it's still a rectangle so I go up to path object and the path and it creates my nodes now now this is the trick I want you to make sure you catch if I'm going to attach this to that so it doesn't just do this I highlight the one I hit my shift key click on the other one and then I go up here to path and I go Union now you'll notice that this doesn't look semi transparent but more importantly if I drag one the whole thing is now a single object now you can always undo that if you want but that's how you would actually do that in the beginning now it's connected as a single piece so now I've created something I don't have a any names in it but I have attached two objects together and that's going to be summation for this lesson on the next one I'll show you how to actually take this exact image and be able to put lettering inside it

Channel: andpet55

Views: 30,055

Keywords: inkscape, plasma, arclight, hydrotherm, tutorial

Id: OkuAWLT55tw

Length: 10min 15sec (615 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 28 2019