Scratch building with Inkscape 1: The absolute basics

[Music] [Music] so hello welcome to chandwell this is a new series where i'm going to show you how i use the free open source application inkscape to help me do all of my scratch building on the layout i use inkscape for everything from the simple things like this road to the more complicated like the iron girder bridge that the road goes under i even made this iron arched bridge using just inkscape and i think the outcome was fantastic there's a video on the top right if you're interested to see how i actually made that bridge today though i'm going to start with the absolute basics of inkscape i'm going to show you how i made this it's just a very gently curving road i ordinarily wouldn't use inkscape for something so simple but it uses most of the absolute basic elements of inkscape and it shows you how i use them to get the results that i do for my scratch builds in future episodes i'm going to show more advanced features of inkscape i'm going to actually build something much more impressive than a little hill with a rod on top i'm going to build a river bridge that the road is going to go over based upon one in oakley in yorkshire if you want to watch the build of that bridge please subscribe and i hope you like this new series so here we are with inkscape just opened this is a very simple thing we're going to do so you normally wouldn't use inkscape for something so simple but i wanted to show some of the basics first so we're looking at a blank sheet of a4 paper in front of us what i normally do is i ignore that to start with because i like to get my drawings done irrespective of the size of paper they're eventually going to be printed on so what you can do is you can just scroll upwards until the page disappears and now we've got a white canvas into which we can do our drawing also make sure that the units are set correctly if we look up here at the top i've got mine set to millimeters you can choose to work in centimeters inches if you wish but generally i work in millimeters and obviously i model in n gauge so two millimeters is one foot in the real world i'm going to go over to the left hand side and choose the rectangle icon it says there create rectangles and squares once the tool is selected you'll see my mouse cursor has changed it's showing a little rectangle there and we simply click and drag to create a rectangle now an important thing to know about inkscape is how it measures things if we select that rectangle up in the top we see four boxes we see it's x and y position and that's where it is on the canvas we don't need to worry about that just yet but you also see its width and its height so i happen to have drawn a rectangle there 579 millimeters wide by 288 millimeters tall if we click onto the rectangle and choose to color it in let's color it in red we now need to make it size that we want for the layout so i want it to be 39 millimeters wide so i'll come up to the width box here select the text that's in there already and type three 390 millimeters that's 39 centimeters that is now the right correct width now i said that i wanted to start at 23 millimeters high and finish at 40 millimeters high so i'm going to make the height 40 millimeters so there's our rectangle now we can zoom in if we wish there's a zoom bar at the bottom so we click the plus button and the minus button to zoom in and out or we can hold the ctrl key down on our keyboard and just wheel the mouse in and out and that's a good way of zooming in and out so there we have our rectangle 39 39 centimeters wide by four centimeters tall now if we come over to this side of the rectangle and zoom in a bit more i'm going to draw one more rectangle same again select the rectangle tool and just drag it out doesn't matter what size i make it but it's important to make it a different color just so you can see what's going on i'm going to make this one a nice blue i'm going to make this one 23 millimeters tall so this is the height that i want the road to start and this red one is the height that i want the road to finish now i'm going to drag this rectangle close to the red one and as you'll see as i reach the bottom of its corner it snaps to it see how it jumps onto the corner that's called snapping and that's a very powerful tool in inkscape that we use all the time to make sure it's turned on for you look at the very far right hand side of the screen this top button turns snapping on and off altogether we can turn it off and now it doesn't snap anymore we turn it on it does snap this one turned on it's called snap nodes paths and handles and this one snap to cusp nodes including rectangle corners those two are the important ones that we need for this so with those turned on we can drag the drag this close to the bottom corner and snap it on and then that's there if we zoom in right close you can see that it's perfectly lined up so that comes in handy for what we're about to do what i want is i want to have the road to be 200 millimeters of flat road before it starts going uphill so i'm going to do another rectangle this time i've chosen a different color again i'll make it green i'm going to make this rectangle the same height as the blue one which is 23 millimeters and i'm going to make it 200 millimeters wide i'm going to drag this one and drop it there so now we have our rough outline of where we want our hill to be so i'm going to select the fine point pen tool um it's this one here it looks like a fine line a pen is drawing drawing a curved line i'm going to click that and as you see as i drop it on the corners it snaps to the corners of objects so what i'm going to do i'm going to click it once in the bottom corner and that activates the line tool i'm going to click once on the green one i'm going to click once on the other side of the green one click at the top of the red one the bottom of the red one and then back to where i started and then choose a select tool and what that's done is it's drawn a shape for us which i'm going to color in a nice yellowy color so there we are so we can drag that away now and that is the rough outline of our hill we can delete all the other objects we don't need those anymore they were just there for our guidelines so you see i do you do see a lot of layouts with hills like this where you've got a bit of flat ground then a sudden transition to an uphill it doesn't look very realistic though and i want to make this a little bit more of a gradual curve make it look like what a road really would so to do that i'm going to choose the node tool and the node tool is this one in the top it says edit paths by nodes when i select that you'll see that each individual point where i clicked has turned into a little diamond shape and what can do is i can drag those diamond shapes to change the shape drag any one of them but we don't want to do that what i want to do is i want to make this line here into a nice curve so to do that i'm going to click somewhere in the middle of the line and then just start dragging and you'll see that's now turned that line into a nice curve so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to drag it down into the right a little bit something like that and now we've got the basic the basis of a of a hill starting towards the end now i think this is far too steep um looking at it so if i select the node tool again we can move this node possibly somewhere to the left now i could just move it to the left like this but then i risk making it all look a bit bendy but if you press ctrl down then you can only move it left and right just until it starts looking a bit better a bit more gradual so that looks okay we can also use this little circle here just to play with it a little bit more um but i'm going to possibly go something like that i also think that the four centimeters and that might be might be too big um so i'm quickly going to do another box make it only let's go 35 millimeters high something like that so i think that looks more or less how i was wanting so it's a flat rod for a while then it starts going uphill gradually yep and that's our shape so that's the shape that we want so what we can do now is start thinking about how to print it and get it onto some card if we zoom back out and drag it down to our a4 sheet of paper you'll see it doesn't fit on so if we chop this in half we can get it onto the paper there's an easy way of chopping it in half we don't need to worry about it what we can do is we can draw a rectangle roughly this roughly the width of the paper so we've got we've got a rectangle there on top and then we've got this so we place this here somewhere and the rectangle on top we can then select them both now to select two objects in inkscape we click the first one and we hold shift down and click the second one now making sure that the rectangle is on top and the shape that we want is underneath and with the both selected we can go to the path menu and click division what this does is it takes the top object chops it so where the rectangle was we've now chopped that in half so get them arranged on the paper it doesn't matter how yet and i'll show you why in a second select them both and this is where this is now where i set them up ready for printing so we're going to do a fill of white i'm going to have an outline of a mid gray so if we hold down shift and choose 50 gray and then click white without holding any buttons down that now gives us an outline that we can print i want to print three of them out like i said so what i'm going to do is i'm going to select them both and you can click them and hold shift down like we did before or you can just use your mouse and drag around them and that selects them both select them both i'm then going to duplicate them so i'm going to hold down ctrl and press d on my keyboard or we can do edit duplicate if you do edit duplicate let's now create two of them and we'll just drag down and now we've got two sets do duplicate again ctrl d and drag down we now have three sets so because i'm going to stick this onto some card and then cut around it once the glue's dry i need to have some space around my objects so what i'm going to do is i'm going to select that bottom one and drag it to the bottom of the paper maybe put it there so that one at the bottom and that one at the top well wouldn't it be nice to be able to just space them out between the two and we can do that so we can select everything by dragging a box around it and then on the right hand side here we've got align and distribute i'm going to click that and then i'm going to click this one here which is distribute centers equidistantly vertically if we click that all of our pieces are now evenly spread out on the page and that is what we're going to then cut out roughly stick to card and then cut out neatly once it's finished and that's all there is to it so what i'm going to do is i'm going to print that out by using file print and that is it once we've done that we're going to cut around them stick them to card and then chop them out and get it on the layout and see how it works so that's the first step-by-step thing i've ever done in inkscape i don't know if i'm any good at it or whether this has been of use to you um please put some comments down below of things you might want to see more of things i didn't explain very well or whether you think i should give up this because i was not good at all so it'd be interesting to hear your comments thank you for this bit let's see how it looks on the layout and there it is so i printed it stuck it to card then glued all the card together and it looks okay um it's very subtle um it was a lot of effort for very little return really but i did want to show some of the inkscape basics so that's it i hope that that was of some use um if you did enjoy that or if you want to follow the rest of this series or even if you don't want to see inkscape again you just want to watch the rest of my normal videos please click that class 47 down there subscribe and i'll see if my next one thanks for watching we'll see you again

Channel: Chandwell

Views: 6,075

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Id: EZTqztrup7k

Length: 13min 31sec (811 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 20 2020