The new "Flatten" path operation in Inkscape is a time saver

in this tutorial I'll be going over how you can use the new flatten path operation which was introduced into version 1.3 of inkscape when it was released earlier this year this isn't something that I've gone over on this channel yet but it can be really useful once you know how to use it so I wanted to show you how it works and an example of when it would be useful so to get started I'm going to grab my circles and ellipses tool and I'm going to click and drag on my canvas to draw a circle and I'm going to make that Circle a light shade of gray and I'm going to give this circle a black stroke by holding the shift key and clicking on the black color swatch down here in the color menu once I've done that I'll grab my selection tool and I'm going to click and drag on the object and then press the space bar while doing so to create copies of this object that overlap each other like that now once I've created this what I have here is a series of four individual paths that intersect and overlap each other if I wanted to create new paths based on the visual appearance of these paths right here what I could do is I could select all of them come up here to the path menu and select flatten and if you deselect everything you can see nothing is visually changed on your screen but if you move these objects they are now separated as you can see there now this is something that could always be done with inkscape but in the past it required a sequence of multiple path operations now with the flatten path operation it could be done with one single execution so now let's go over an example of when something like this can be useful I'm going to grab the circles and ellipses tool again and I'm going to click and drag while holding control to create a perfectly round circle and I'm going to open up my fill and stroke menu by double clicking the color stripe down here and I'm going to bring the opacity of this down roughly in half now I'll grab my selection tool I'll click on the object so I get my rotation handles and I'm going to take this rotation Center and move this down I'm going to hold my control key while I do that so that it locks it onto the vertical axis and I'm going to move the rotation Center down to about here here and once I've done that I'm going to grab this corner rotation handle and I'm going to hold my control key while I do this to lock it onto 15° increments and I'm going to press the space bar and add a new copy every two steps so one two one two and I'll just continue doing this until I have completed the circle so what I have now is an array of circles that follow a circular pattern what I'm going to do is I'm going to select all of these circles and I'll come up here to the path menu and I'm going to select combine and it's it's going to combine all of those together into a single shape as you can see here uh but the difference is when you use combine it preserves the pads if I grab the nodes tool you can see all of those individual pads are still preserved now I'm going to go back to my selection tool and I'm going to come over here to my fill and stroke menu and Under The Fill tab I'm going to come over here and click on this option that says any path self intersections or sub paths create holes in the fill and I'm going to click on that and what it's going to do is it's going to create negative space in the areas where these paths intersect with each other now if I bring the opacity of this all the way up you can see we have a pretty interesting design here this could be used to create mandala designs or even like an abstract logo or something like that uh but the problem here is that this is still recognized as a series of individual circles so if I wanted to break this path apart into individual shapes and give these shapes different colors it wouldn't work to show you what I mean if I go to path and I select break apart it breaks everything apart into individual circles again because like I mentioned the combined path effect preserves all of those original paths so let me undo that so this is where I'm going to use flatten I'll come up here to path and I will select flatten and what happens is it took the visual appearance of this object and created individual shapes out of it so I can move this out of the way and you could see that that's now an individual shape so let me put that back to where it was and now I will go to path and I will select break apart and now I have all of these individual objects that I could select and color if I want to and that's just one example of what you can do with the new flatten path effect if you found this lesson useful then consider checking out my inkscape master class it's a collection of over 60 videos where I go over all of the tools and features in inkscape and I explain what they are and demonstrate how they work kind of like how I did in this video we even have a private Community where you can ask questions and get help from me anytime you want and best of all there's no monthly membership fees you just pay $17 one time and you're in for Life I'll have some information about that down below if you want to check that out as always thanks for [Music] watching o

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 11,933

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Id: Ot0G-XfmGtw

Length: 5min 6sec (306 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 13 2023