Scratch building with Inkscape 2: Making the most of Inkscape

[Music] [Music] so hello welcome to the second in my series on how i use inkscape for scratch building on my engage model railway chandwell for this episode i'm going to show you some more of the basics i'm going to do that by answering some of the questions that you added to my first video which was the absolute basics thank you for all those people who commented on that and i've put a link to it at the top up there so you can watch it if you haven't seen it already so i'm going to dive straight in and we're going to have a look at the first question what i have done is i've split this video up into sections i'm into chapters so if you're interested in a particular section um they're listed in the description you can just click the link and go straight to it if you want my first question um was from elvenhome engage model railway now if you've not seen steven's channel i do recommend you go and check it out it's very inspirational he's got a lovely layout and his videos are a great mix of watching his progress on constructing the layout and also some hints and tips on all kinds of aspects of modelling so especially for model engage but regardless of the scale if you've not seen steven's channel please go and check that out and i've put a link to that in the description as well anyway stephen said he didn't have all the dialogues on the right of the screen when he was looking compared to the ones that i had now i use windows and i'd only just installed inkscape version one and i just accepted the defaults that were there now i've not seen it on a mac so i don't know how that works or how it looks differently um but i thought i'd just spend a minute just showing you the dialogues i use all the time and if they're not there how to get them so the dialogues on the are on the right hand side of the screen up here and you can see i've got the layers one open at the moment we can click the little arrow there and the whole set of dialogues disappear that's useful if you want to have more space to concentrate on your drawings you can always get them back by clicking on the one that you want so i have the layers one open there so i can open that and make it bigger or smaller if i wish so starting with the layers one and the layers are very useful and essentially what it labels you do is put all of your drawings into into different layers so different shapes into different layers and i've got an example of how i use those layers here so in my recent build when i built a 13th century river bridge based upon one in otley in yorkshire i used layers to help me build that so i found an image of the bridge online in the bridges conservation management plan and i imported that into inkscape and put it in a layer of its own called image now i can see the bridge here and i can move it around if i wish but what i can do is i can actually lock that layer so if i press the padlock up there that layer is now locked so it's as if it's not there in terms of being able to select it and that enables me to now to draw on top of that bridge and without fear of accidentally moving it so once i've got that layer in place i create another layer on top called shapes and if we click the little eye to show that so we can show and hide layers at different points so you can see there that i drew the arches on top of the image in a layer of their own this was a way of making sure that i got the correct shape to those arches and then i also used it for some measurements to make sure that the it was the right size for n scale so the document told me how wide this arch was so once i scaled that to the correct size i knew that all of the other bits and pieces that i drew on this drawing were the right size so that was handy once i had the shapes i can show and hide the background if i wish on top of that i then drew the main outline of the bridge now this was this is what gave me all the different bits and pieces to cut out once it was stuck onto card so you can see i did individual wall sections i did the buttresses for the starlings to to attach to all the separate shapes and because all of those shapes are in their own layer i can show and hide the back the background when i don't need it and i carry on building up like that i also use a naught layer to put individual pieces of text on to remind me what i'm doing and because those are in a layer of their own i can show and hide them as i need and i find that really useful so that's the layers dialog i also use the align and distribute panel so if we click into that this enables us just to arrange shapes in various different ways so if we turn on a layer that i've got set to show to show an example of that so you've got lots of different pieces of lots of different red rectangles here so if i then select them all and use some of the different arrangement buttons we can show you how it works so we can distribute them evenly that's based upon their edges or based upon an equidistance but gap between them so each one's now got the same gap between them we can center them we can arrange them to the top and the bottom and everything else so it's fairly straightforward what that does so i use it all the time when i'm drawing my scratch builds so that comes in handy so those two are the ones i use most of the time and stephen in future videos i'll always show you how to get back to those if they're not open so for example the layer one is on the layer menu where we click layers and that will open the layers list and the distribute one is on object align and distribute and that brings that one up to scroll up onto the screen as well so the second question was from samuel merson who said he would be keen to know how i'd go about scratch building a house or terrace so i'm not going to go into the full details of how scratch builder house right now but my next few videos are going to be how i'm going to build a mill and the mill i'm going to use is going to be similar to this one in bradford and because chandra is based loosely on bradford so my series is going to show how i start designing that in inkscape all the way through up to how i finish it off so samuel please do watch that i think that'll be useful for you or at least interesting just a quick one though on chandwell i had this i had this space that i wanted to fill i would fill it with a little um commercial building of some type my son suggested a bakery so we thought we'd build a bakery so what i do when i'm building any building either is i always measure the space first um so based upon the measurements of that part of the baseboard i then built something like this so i i wanted to make it three three pieces a main building and two outbuildings the second the larger of the outbuildings has an interesting crush cut off an angle wall to fit on the side of the baseboard so using those measurements i just basically create rectangles and then some of those rectangles i put a point on top and then build a simple structure like this all i then do is outline it stick it to serial packet this enables me to create a mocked up building just to make sure that everything fits once everything does fit and i know that that is going to work i then build upon these shapes that i've created in inkscape to add the windows add the textures and everything else so like i said future videos will show how i do that so do stick around if you want to and watch that so the next question is from paul paul james he says he struggles um getting textures imported into outlines like building walls and having them import at the correct scale without enlarging now this is probably the bigger question i want to concentrate on paul because this is a this can be a really tricky issue to get your head around so what i'm going to do is i'm going to start talking a little bit about shapes and how we join shapes and then we'll have a look at the textures so first of all shapes as i said in my previous video all of my buildings are based upon rectangles so let's go for an absolute basic thing let's say a house you might but you might draw a rectangle to build a house so there's our as a there's our rectangle now if you're just going to use that as the outline of something that you're going to stick some texture paper on yourself you'd probably fill it in white and give it a black border but you probably want to add some windows as well so if you're going to add a window or a door you would probably go about drawing another rectangle so let's say you'd have a win a window there and a window there you probably wouldn't draw it twice what you'd probably do to get them the same size is you'd select the first one that you did and then duplicate it so ctrl and d does it duplicate and if you duplicate what that does is it creates a second one on top then holding the ctrl key down you can drag your mouse to the right or the left and what that does is it keeps it level with the first one if you don't have the control key down it moves like this if you hold the control key down it moves like that regardless of where you put your mouse or it moves downwards so that's a good way of getting all your windows lined up without using the alignment distributor i showed before but duplicate this one again and put it there so you're now looking at the basic is your house you've got your front of your house with its windows if you wanted to print that that's fine but what happens if you wanted to color in the house and you wanted to add some texture well what we do is you'd select the outline window and you'd give it a nice kind of brick brown color and that's worked all right you could probably print that out as well but if we look these are just white rectangles on top of the brown background so if we were to have something like a spiral and then we start to move the house around first thing you'll notice is if i drag if i grab the black the the rectangle it's left the windows behind and it's left the windows behind because they are not part of the house so what you can do is you can select the windows and move them together or you can even select everything and then group it by right clicking and saying group once it's grouped everything moves together but if we see let's just bring the house to the top if the house is on top of the spiral you can't see through the windows so the windows are still just literally rectangles on top of the back wall so ideally we don't want that so what we can do is we can cut the windows out and to cut the windows out we use one of the shape tools which i use all the time so if you select the background and you select the first window in fact let's make the windows blue for now select the background and the first window the window on top just by holding shift down so click the background hold shift click the foreground and then we do path we can do difference and what difference does is it takes the shape on top away from the shape underneath and essentially leaves a hole so if we to do that three times [Music] and now we drag this around you'll see that it's one shape i don't have to group it and if we drag it on top of the spiral you can see through the spiral and that's because that now has holes in so if you're going to draw draw something like that once you start adding textures it makes it a lot easier to have the shape as an actual shape now you might you might also want a little extra bit of building on the side you might want to make it a two level a two level structure so for that we can draw another rectangle on the side and now we have the same problem as before it's two different it's two different rectangles so again we can group it um or we can make it into one shape and to join two shapes together so we used difference earlier to take the shapes away to join them together we use the union path command so we should select both shapes holding shift down clicking them both and we do path union what union does you can see there from its little icon it joins the shapes together so we'll click that that's now made one shape and that is the shape of our house that we're going to build we might want a door in there as well so what we can do is we'll just draw roughly a rectangle to the roughly the right size i'm not even going to line it up to the bottom properly i'm going to shift click okay click the brown one shift click the blue one and do path difference you see that it's cut out the space for the door so now we have one shape with all the holes in the right places so that's now ready to add the texture but before we add the texture to it let's talk about how we get the texture scaled so if you're using a texture that you've downloaded specifically at n scale then you don't need to worry about the size of the bricks or whatever is on the texture um as you as you import because it will import into inkscape at the right size however here's a texture that i've downloaded from textures.com it's of some old bricks and it's just come in at the size that it is that website you'll get different sizes depending upon the quality that you choose so i chose medium quality and the bricks have come in at this size now to get it to the right size for end scale we need to make sure that the bricks are going to print out around about the right size of real bricks i did a little bit of looking on google and the average size of a brick or standard size of a brick apparently is 215 millimeters long by 65 millimeters high so i work in n scale which is one to one four eight so essentially divide the two figures by whatever your scale is that you're working in so in n scale a standard size brick will be 1.45 millimeters long by 0.44 millimeters high so you can then use inkscape's measuring tools to get this to the right size so up here we've got the width and the height so i've drawn a simple red rectangle and i need to make it 1.4527 millimeters wide 1.4527 and we need to make it 0.4392 millimeters high zero point four three nine two and if we make that that high then that brick is almost in or you almost can't see it so for scrolling very very very hot very very close there is our proper n-scale sized brick if we make sure that's on top and we drag it on top of the texture that we downloaded from texas.com you'll see that it's loaded in a much too much too larger scale for n scale that we're working in so all we need to do is make it smaller so to do that we just use we click on it once and we see this bottom handle here it's got a little diagonal left and right arrow we can click that and start moving it now if we just start moving it like that you'll see that it doesn't maintain the aspect ratio so we end up with very squashed tall bricks or very squashed wide bricks if we hold the control key down however it will maintain that aspect ratio so no matter how we move the mouse it'll stay the correct size or the correct uh proportions so what we need to do is we need to make it smaller and smaller and smaller until the bricks are around about the size of the brick that we put on top and you can keep zooming in to to see so i'm still a little bit too big and to zoom in i just hold the ctrl key and move the wheel on my mouse so we're going to carry on keeping control press down and keep making it smaller and smaller and smaller and eventually we'll end up with a brick around about the right size for what we're looking at so i think that is close enough so it doesn't need to be exact at this such a small scale but now what we've got is we've got an image of some bricks which is around about the right size for n scale so we've got that we can then delete all of the other bits and pieces that we created to help with that so how do we add this to our building well let's get our house back i'll remove the spiral you'll see i've made that house way too big for n scale let's make it a little bit smaller i don't need to know exactly what size it needs to be but we'll make it small enough so the bricks fit on now i've got one texture here which has got which is just big enough for my building but in many cases you'll have a bigger build my next video will show how i join the textures together so you get one constant texture rather than something with a join in it so how do we get that texture onto here now one way obviously is just to drag it on top and take away the fill colour and then you could print that out and you could very easily cut around the black lines and then you've got what you need obviously that isn't probably what you'd want to do because you air you don't want to waste the printer ink because it costs more than probably anything else in the world and two it makes a little bit awkward because you've got that problem again where you're dragging two things around separately now you could group them like i showed you before but it is easier to work with if this is one shape now inkscape has got a fabulous feature called clipping all clipping does is it says clip the image underneath to the shape of the image on top let's do an example let's say i'm drawing something which has got lots of different rectangles on but i want it to be in a circle shape so what we can do then is draw a circle on top and just so you can see it i'll color in the circle now if we were to select all of those rectangles and group them drop the circle on top so with the circle on top i select the group of rectangles and then holding the shift key down i select the circle and then right click and choose set clip and what that has done is it is only showing the rectangles that are within the shape of the circle so we've got a circular bit of rectangles and i can change the size of it and everything and everything stays together so it's one shape that contains the the rectangles that i drew and you can get it back again by holding by right clicking and clicking release clip and that put it all back to how it was but for now we will delete all of that and we're going to use the same technique on the textures so we've got the outline of our house which is one shape and now this technique only works if you have done the previous bit which is convert it into one shape if you make it two shapes or multiple shapes it won't work the clip will only apply to one of them and you'll end up all confused so do make sure you're starting with one shape just to be sure i always work with shapes with no lines and just a fill that way you see the shape that you're working with and it's obvious so you position the shape into around about the right place that you want and once you've got it in the right place you click the texture and you hold shift down and click the shape you right-click and you set clip and once you've done that there is your piece ready for cutting ready for putting with other elements of the build and putting all together now what i would do with this i might um put some shading or something underneath the lintels or around the images or put a lintel above the door and then maybe apply some shading might also apply some weathering at this point just by such stains and things like that but i will show you that in a future video we don't need to worry about that right now so that is that and paul i hope that's gone somewhere to show you how um i work with textures and it's nice once you've got that you can move it around and do all kinds of things with it and so if you wanted to have the back the back of the image done the back of the building done as well you can press ctrl d to duplicate it drag it around and then flip it around and then you've got the back side of the building as well so that is really that comes in really handy it's really useful so that is how i work with textures paul okay time for a quick tip um this one's from oz lodger and we wanted to know how best to draw a simple line with arrows at both ends to show the size of an object example 100 millimeters in those lines like that so we've got our building we want to measure how tall it is we can use the measurement tool so if we click the measurement tool there and then just draw the line from the corners now it'll snap to the corners so we can see we can draw drag this line out to the bottom of the line we want to measure and it says that it's 27.17 millimeters tall once we've got that measured there's all kinds of interesting things we can do if we click this arrow here we've got it's called mark dimension if we click that that automatically puts on is 27.17 millimeters tall once we've got that those are just normal shapes that we can do whatever we want with so if we do that that works perfectly so that's one way of doing it you might also be interested to know how big that is in the real world now obviously you can take 27.17 millimeters multiply it by 148 and get the result or if we choose the same measurement again so we've got the measurement there 27.17 see up here we've got scale and precision if we make this precision zero that'll get rid of the 0.17 if we wanted to but the scale is interesting so if we wanted to measure that as it would be in the real world we need to add a percentage scale so we've got 148 so 148 times 14 800. so if we then switch that to centimeters say and then click that that comes out at 402 centimeters but that that is how we can do that so that's one way of doing it but um jeff wanted a specific one where he wanted the measurement within sizes so if you want to do one manually yourself you've got a couple of options you can draw a line so you can draw a line by holding the ctrl key down and that gives you straight lines and then double clicking at the end so i've got a line like that then if you go to the fill and stroke menu if it's not open already it's on object fill and stroke and what we can do there is with the line selected we can say that the we can choose the markers so we choose an arrow at one end and an arrow at the other end so that gives us a nice line with the arrows on and you can play with the widths and the sizes of the of the arrows and then we can just use text so by selecting the text icon and clicking we can say 100 millimeters we can then select them both and using the align and distribute which if it's not open already it's on object align and distribute we can then say we want them in the middle and we want them in the middle like that so now you've got um something like that we then just need to add a little break so if we add a wet rectangle like that make sure that it is between the arrow and the text so we move it back one select them put them in the middle and make the arrow white there's one example so then you select all three and you right click and you do group and there's your arrow complete you can then by clicking on it twice and holding the ctrl key down while you move this you can get it to 90 degrees if you wish so that's another way of doing it that's where if you want to do it manually but if i tend to use the automatic way like that which we use the measuring tool for if we come back to the measuring tool and we're going to measure across the diagonals here you might like this line where it puts the puts the angles and everything on as well what we can do is we can press this button here convert to item and what that does is it creates an actual item which you can move around and interact with and if you put those on layers of layers of their own then they stay in place and that's brilliant if you're doing um things like track measurements and track plans to get the radius of curves and things and that looks really good so that is that that is how i work with measurements um jeff hope that makes sense hope it's of some use to you please give it a go and let me know how you get on so john said he would have liked to have seen me printing it out and assembling the cutouts in the finished product so first of all john i don't print directly to card i always print to paper if i'm printing something just for background or just for structure i just use bog standard 80 gsm tesco value copier paper which i then use glue stick to stick onto card i use glue stick and then i press it down with a wallpaper roller to make sure that it sticks quite well and i use normal glue that i get off ebay if i'm doing something with an actual texture on it it's going to become the finished print i use 120 gsm matte photo paper from ebay i use quite thin paper 120 it's not very thick simply because it makes it easier to fold that paper around the card once it's on the card anything thicker it tends to bend and the print comes off and it doesn't work very well i like nice crisp lines and i use the printer it's just a canon mgs5 700 printer and it's got separate ink tanks which is which is nice for this kind of work because you'll find that the ink runs out at different rates i use the ultra print quality setting on that for the actual prints themselves and i find that gives a great surface and really nice tight image that comes out so i always print onto paper and i just stick to card my next episode where i talk about actually building a building you'll see everything that i do from step to step focusing on inkscape but i will show you how i put everything back together as well so please john subscribe if you haven't already and watch that video which i'll be starting very soon i've got no more tips for this video um the next video i'm going to start actually building something as you've seen and there must be at least 50 arches on chandwell so i've drawn a lot of arches in inkscape so i'm also going to do a video where i talk about how i get the most out of arches if you found that useful please let me know in the comments more importantly if you found anything confusing or if you've got any questions about using inkscape to scratch build please add comments below as well i will answer those in my next episode in the meantime thank you for watching i'll see you next time

Channel: Chandwell

Views: 5,167

Keywords: Inkscape, Scratch Building, Card, Tutorial, Model Railway, N Gauge

Id: j4FbjlZVjXg

Length: 27min 0sec (1620 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 19 2020