Scratch Building with Inkscape: Textures - your questions answered

[Music] [Music] so so i got this question from neil watson on one of my older videos where i show how i built the iron arch bridge he says the part where you gave the impression of an i-beam really interested me he said it was easy to do but skipped over it would really welcome a tutorial on how to do that okay then neil let's hope that i can answer your question let's take a look at the girder that i used in that bridge so you'll recognize this it's used on the opening of these videos and it's also in a prominent position on the layout you can see that it's got a 3d effect so let's take a look at what makes up that 3d effect if you zoom in you see this looks a little bit like an i-beam and these look like little raised raised areas if we deconstruct that you'll see how i made it so the first trick is to actually use real 3d and by that i mean this is actually made up of three individual parts if we take them up if we take them apart you'll see what i mean so each girder was built of three half millimeter pieces of card so this was printed out stuck to card cut out and then pasted on top of each other so the bottom bit didn't really have anything so we can disregard that this next bit had those prominent 3d areas but the bit that neil's asking about is this bit which i've made this look a little bit like an i-beam now this at n scale it's very very small if we measure the height of this you see that's only three and a half millimeters so it's very small so you couldn't really get any more genuine 3d effect onto that without using 3d printing or some other kind of technique so it's all into the printing to make it look as though it's 3d so let's take a look at how i did that if you're looking really really close you'll see it's just a set of lines so we've got a dark line a light line a dark line a light line and a dark line slightly different widths i think that's probably more accidental than on purpose but the effect it gives is that nice 3d i-beam kind of effect so let's take a look at how to achieve that it's very straightforward the nice thing with working with textures is you don't always have to concentrate on getting textures of the right scale this beam works perfectly at n scale but when you have a look at the actual texture that it's using it's using this enormous picture of a beam the beam is almost 67 millimeters high which would make it almost 10 meters in a scale n gauge but we it's just the rust that i was after so i started with the texture so i select the rectangle tool and i was going to draw a beam around about the same size as i used under the girder i'm going to do this little straight beam it's easier to show what i did so i'm going to make this beam three and a half millimeters high same as the curved beam on the bridge so we select the red beam we hold down shift and we select the green texture so they're both selected we right click we click set clip and there we have our rusty beam i haven't managed to get it lined up with any good rusty patches i'm going to right click release clip drag it to somewhere a little bit more rusty and repeat the process so there we go so the beam looks a little bit rusty this time so if we were just to print that out and use it on a bridge or a component it looks a little bit flat it doesn't have that nice 3d effect it certainly doesn't look like an eye beam so how do we do that and this is a really really easy trick if we take a normal rectangle and we'll make it a mid-gray color now the trick is to imagine that the light is coming from above so if this was 3d you'd have a little bit of light catching the top edge so all we do is we take the pen tool with snapping on you'll see that it'll snap to the corner handle to corner the click once hold ctrl down so that we're doing a horizontal line and when it snaps to the other corner we double click so we put a line along the top all you need to do is make that line maybe make it a little bit thicker it is if we go to fill and stroke and then stroke style we'll see it's 0.265 millimeters for some reason we'll make it point four millimeters make it a little bit wider so let's select the line hold down shift and choose a lighter gray for it repeat the process at the bottom and already that's looking a little bit more 3d i think it certainly would if we made it full length and made those lines a little bit [Music] thicker so the technique is simply that we put a light line where the highlight is and a dark line where the low light is so let's go to this we need to make this look like an i-beam and for that we need to think about what shape an i-beam actually is it looks something like this if you imagine the light coming from the top you'd get a highlight here and here and you'd get a low light or a shadow here and here so there's four lines we want to draw we want to draw a light two light lines on the top bits and two dark lines on the lower bits so let's go down to our girder that we were drawing i'm going to zoom right in just to help me get it into the right place so let's make this look a little bit 3d i'm going to select the line tool and draw a line along the top with that i'm going to make it point three of a millimeter wide and if you notice it's gone along the top i'm just gonna hold ctrl down so it stays in the same place and just drag it down a little bit i'm gonna put it a little bit into the green like this just to give it a bit of a background i'm going to ctrl d to duplicate it i'm going to drag it to a similar place at the bottom i'm going to ctrl d again and move it up and i think i will make it a little bit thinner and so we'll make this point two of millimeter and we'll press ctrl d and drag it to a similar place we don't need to be exact so those are our our lines there now we want this one and this one to be light so what i'm going to do is i'm going to hold down shift and make it white i'm going to select this one hold down shift and select that one and make it a slightly lighter gray so something like that now we're almost there what we'll do is we'll select the four of the lines we'll drag that end out to there [Music] and this end all the way along to there and that is now starting to look a little bit like an eye beam now one last trick you can do rather than just having plain white because obviously you'd want some of the rust to show through if we select the white line hold down shift and select that one so on fill and stroke you've got the blend mode of normal what that does is just basically says treat this as a normal color there's a lot of different things you can do and i'm going to use this one here called overlay and what that does it changes the way that the shape interacts with the colours underneath it if we click overlay you'll see there that it makes it lighter whilst also maintaining some element of the colour so some of the rust shows through and if we scroll out now that has a definite look of an eye beam to it and once that's printed out and used on your components it works really nicely so there are other elements of the 3d effects that i've used such as making these bars here 3d i'm not going to go into those to answer this question but if you are interested on how i do those i'd like more tutorials on how to do 3d effects with textures please let me know in the comments and i'll do my best to answer them here's a question from peter he says he's after a bit of help with importing textures to inkscape he joined up with textures.com and he's been downloading some textures but so he says that some of them are too small so you need some help to join them he's also interested in some weathering prior to printing now peter i'll cover weathering in a future video but for this one let's have a look at using the textures from textures.com there's a picture of my weir pub and there's a video on my channel about how i made that the reason i put that picture there is we're going to use the frontage of the weir as an example of how we use textures so i've gone and i've downloaded a texture from textures.com and it's really good because you can download their lowest quality textures for free but as you scroll down you'll see that even their lowest quality are incredibly high quality considering the size that we need to use on our model railways so obviously i model in n but if we put that up there and then clip it to the front of my pub you'll see that it's way way too big that just looks ridiculous so what we need to do is we need to get that texture scaled down to n scale now my second ever inkscape video covered how i get them to the right scale so i'm not going to go over that again let's concentrate on answering peter's question i'm going to make this a little bit smaller to start with just to make it easier to work with now when you're downloading a texture from textures.com be sure to choose the seamless textures what seamless means is that they join up side by side and top to bottom so if we were to duplicate this texture and pop it there you'll see that you can't really see the join it all goes in together to make one seamless texture if we duplicate these and drag those to there they're drawing up as well so you see they can build up a full-size wall by tiling the textures like this so once you've done that you could of course group them by selecting all four right click and clicking group then you've got a group so that's one element you can then pop your shape on top and clip them so that's one way of doing it but i wouldn't recommend doing it that way and i'll explain why if we make this even smaller let's make it more like what it would need to be for my chosen scale of n i think it would look something more like that you'd have to end up copying and pasting it lots of times and then your file size could get bigger although if you watch my answer to question three you'll see how i avoid that but it's still a lot of work for no real benefit so let's have a look at what else you can do so we've got our building element that we want to fill i've got the texture the right size so what i'm going to do is i'm going to use the object menu go down to pattern and then click object to pattern i've clicked that and nothing's happened but behind the scenes something very special has happened so with the pub front selected and that's one shape it's very important that it's a single shape so you'll see i can color it in the windows and doors aren't white rectangles they're actual holes in the shape so watch my second inkscape video again if you need to remember how to do that so with the shape selected i'm going to go to the fill and stroke palette if the fill and stroke palette isn't open you can go to object fill and stroke and then it will open for you i'm going to go to the fill part of it now the fill part of it is where you can choose the color that you want to fill your object in what i'm going to do is i'm going to choose the one two three four fifth element along and that is a pattern fill and i click that and you'll see that automatically that is filled in with our bricks and it's done that because it's called the pattern pattern nine nine one there are various other patterns available white stripes black stripes different shaped stripes etc but because we use object to pattern pattern 991 is our bricks so that's immediately filled in with the bricks but you'll notice a problem even though we scaled the bricks to the right size for our n-gage building it still brought the bricks onto the shape far too big they are way way too big for our n scale there's a way to fix that now my version of inkscape behaves a little bit strangely like this and to be honest i don't know whether it's a bug in inkscape whether it's meant to work like that or whether it's just me so what we do is first of all i'm going to click this button here this is the node tool edit paths by nodes i'm going to press that and this is the tool that you use if you want to change the shape of your shapes by dragging little nodes around but i'm not going to do that it also does something very special when you're working with patterns but to see that you've got a zoom right out so holding down control and wheeling my mouse i'm continuing to wheel my mouse and then somewhere once you get zoomed right out you'll see this little cross circle and square this is really really important the first thing you need to do though is try and get all the little cross and drag it as close to your drawing as you can once you've done that you can zoom all the way back in again and it stays there so you can move your cross and what you do is you see as you're moving across the texture is moving behind the shape so as i move it the bricks move the square now hold down control when you're using the square to keep everything in proportion hold down control and move the square and as you move the square it gets closer to the cross and as you can see the texture gets smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller so you get it to the size that you want the circle by the way rotates it obviously we don't want rotated bricks so we'll leave them there so that's about the right size and that's all that's all there is to it once you've done that that prints out that's an object in its own right if you wanted to have another shape let's say this star and we want that filled in with our pattern we can use the fill and stroke and choose our pattern but you've noticed another problem here even though you enter all the trouble of getting this one scaled down to n scale you've chosen to fill this one in with the pattern and it's gone in its massive size bricks again so what i do whenever i'm starting a new building is i draw a massive rectangle bigger than the biggest element you're going to create for your layout i fill that in in the pattern i use the node tool i zoom right out until i find the little cross now it's down at the bottom for me today but sometimes it's white up at the top as well so you've got to zoom right out until you find it i'm sure there's a reason for it putting it in a weird place but i haven't actually discovered what that reason is so i zoom in i then make it the right size and like i said if you follow my second inkscape video it shows you exactly how i get the bricks the right size so let's let's say that's the right size what i then do is i keep that texture off to the side somewhere whenever i have a new shape that needs filling in i simply go to the texture ctrl d to duplicate it drag it down move it to the back and clip it so that's now clipped and it's the right size bricks for my n scale building if i then wanted to do a star filled in in the right size bricks my n scale building i'd go back up there select the texture drag it down move it to the back and clip it and that way you've got this as the master and then no matter how many objects you build up build from it the scale remains the same you could even export this as an image and keep this as a large texture file and then just treat that as a normal texture as you otherwise would i hope that answered your question peter i will show you a little bit of how i do weathering at the print stage in a future video if you're enjoying this video or finding it useful please press the thumbs up button this encourages me to make more videos like this as i know that people are enjoying them okay so here is a question from liam at deansburytown model railway he says when using textures and then clipping to a shape do you know how to effectively delete or crop away part of the original texture that is no longer required the main reason is to reduce the file size this is a really good question liam and there are a couple of answers i think anyone who's used inkscape with textures will have noticed that file sizes get very large very quickly so i'm going to explain a little bit why that is and then show you some things you can do while working with textures to keep your file size low this makes it quicker to load files quicker to save files and it prevents inkscape from slowing down when you use copy and paste and things like that within your drawings so let's get started so here is a empty inkscape drawing our sample drawing is currently 1.53 kilobytes so it's very small as you'd expect because it's empty i've got a texture here which is 371 kilobytes it's quite a small texture in itself but it's bigger than the drawing file at the moment let's import that into inkscape so here we are with the texture in inkscape let us just save the file straight away and see what's happened to it so we can see that the file is now 502 kilobytes this is interesting just as an aside we dropped a 371 k file into it and it went up by over 500k that is just a side effect of how inkscape stores images inside its files it effectively divides them by six and multiplies them by eight which ends up adding a third to the size of your files so that is why your files actually seem to grow quicker than the textures that you're dropping in there i won't go into any more detail of that because this is a model railway channel not an it channel so with that texture in there let's just say we want to use only a tiny little bit of it let's just say we want a circle of dirty blue concrete so we'll draw the circle on top and clip the circle to that part of the image so there's our dirty concrete circle and we can save that and have a look what's happened to the file size so the file size has gone up by an extra kilobyte just enough space to take the circle but the size is still 504k so the whole of that image is still in there the reason being is that although we've clipped it to the circle if we release the clip the whole of the texture is still there this enables us to move it around and reassign the clip if we wish so the whole image is always in the file lightly and says is there a way to remove it all yes there is what we can do is we can do file export png image and that opens up the export png image panel over on the right now if we select the circle you'll see that this switches to selection leave most of it alone and just make sure that the dpi is at least 600. if you make it bigger the file size gets a lot higher and you won't notice any difference when you're printing it so 600 is a good value for this click the export as button to choose where you're going to save your image and then just click the export button now you'll see that this has created a png image containing our texture and we can then import that back into inkscape and you see here it's an image because this png it's got transparent around so it's it's still a circle it's exactly the same shape and size as the original it's just it you can't unclip it so it's stuck like that now so that is one way of getting rid of all of the extra bits of texture that you don't want liam however it's worth bearing in mind that often the resulting file that you export is bigger than the file you had in the first place so you can see that the original texture was 371k the drawing with it inside was 504k the resulting png was 1190k so in this case i haven't achieved what you wanted i've actually made the problem worse back in inkscape if we make the circle very very small because we're just printing out a very small component here and then we go through the export process again you'll see that this time the resulting png image is much much smaller so we've reduced it from 371k to 6k so if you're working with small components then this is definitely a technique you can use but bear in mind that once you've done that you can't alter this so let's look at some other ways of working with textures in inkscape if we draw a couple of circles and save the file the file is still 3k it's actually gone up from just over 2 to 2.5 so these circles aren't taking up much space at all the inkscape file itself is just text that explains where the circles are and what color they are so no matter how big i make those circles or where i put them they only take up a tiny piece of the file that inkscape uses to save them if we add the texture to the file as you'd expect the file size increases so we're now on 504 kilobytes and the reason for that is that the image is embedded in the file it takes up a lot of space because it's a big image now you saw that when i had two circles in my drawing the circle was in the file described twice there's two circles in there if i copy and paste this texture in my file and save it the file size is now a megabyte so it's doubled in size because we've doubled the images when you're working with textures like this you might be doing this you might you might have one circle with this texture on this might not be a circle obviously it might be the gable end of a house or something like that you might duplicate it using ctrl d like i always do you might release the clip you might change the texture around a little bit and then reapply it so you've now got two shapes with the same texture and when you look at the size of that file it's one megabyte that is because you've duplicated the texture and the texture is stored in that file twice can we make this any better the answer is yes let's look at one way of keeping these file sizes down i'm going to introduce the concept of cloning let's do a yellow circle again and then if you're using copy and paste so ctrl c ctrl v or if you're using duplicate ctrl d you've now got three circles let's make this one red let's make this one green squash it and rotate it so there's our three circles however there's another way you can do that here's a green circle and this time instead of copying pasting or duplicating i'm going to use edit clone create clone but you can also use alt d4 let's create a clone and use alt d to create another clone i can make this one red and if i make that one red the other two go red as well let's make the original one a different shape the others change shape let's rotate the original one the others rotate and they're rotating because these two are clones of this one so whatever we do to this one is done to the other ones as well so that's useful when it comes to working with textures here's the texture in our drawing the file size is 503 kilobytes select the texture use alt d to create a clone use alt d again use alt d again use alt d again so now i've got one two three four five of the texture in this file let's save the file the size of the file has gone up by one kilobyte this image is only in the file in one place and the rest are clones so it's not saving it in different locations obviously if we change the size of it they all change because they're clones but you wouldn't do that anyway so liam the way that i work is i have one texture and i keep it off to the side and if i'm working with shapes this might be the gable end of a building for example i will come to the texture i'll press alt d to clone it move it to where i want and apply the clip then i'll do another one select the texture alt d apply the clip do another one alt d apply the clip and i work like that and no matter how much i do with that the file size remains constant it doesn't get bigger very quickly and that makes it very simple to save copy and paste and open my files because they don't get absolutely massive that's one technique but what happens if you've got a lot of different textures to work with in one drawing your files can still get a little bit large so this last tip works as long as you keep your textures and your inkscape drawings on the same computer all the time so let's have a look i'm going to import this texture which is 371 kilobytes i'm going to do that by dragging it into inkscape in the usual way now here at the import point you might have noticed you get this image import type embed or link we've been using embed so far which means we're inserting the texture into the inkscape file if we click link however the texture comes in and if we save this file the file is only four kilobytes the it hasn't gone up to 500 like it did last time come back here we can use normal duplicate so these aren't clones these are just normal duplicates of each other no matter how many we put in and we've saved the file that file is now only seven kilobytes it's absolutely tiny why is that because we chose link rather than embed all the inkscape is saving in its own file is a reference to where that texture is on my computer it is telling inkscape i want a texture don't import the texture just use the texture from the computer now this works really well for me i simply keep all my textures in a folder that never changes and i just link them that way all of my inkscape files as small as they possibly can be this works well when clipping there's our texture and the file is tiny so that is actually the best way of working liam because you don't lose any quality like that and you keep your files to an absolute minimum one thing you do need to be careful of though when working in this way is if you accidentally delete the texture or move it to a different part of your computer then your image in inkscape breaks if you release the clip you'll see here that you get this big linked image not found um box and it can be difficult to fix so that's just something to watch out on that so liam there's a couple of options to keep your file sizes down i hope that answered your questions if you've got any more please let me know and i'll do my best to answer them i hope you found these three answers useful or enjoyable if you did find them of use please press the thumbs up button this will encourage me to make more videos like this in future you might also want to subscribe and watch the continued evolution of my engage city-based viaduct layout until next time thank you for watching and i'll see you later

Channel: Chandwell

Views: 5,578

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Id: hWDnPtmd91c

Length: 28min 56sec (1736 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 11 2021