I am in the process of teaching myself Inkscape to design items with the GF (I am a new GF user as well). I could use a little help with a particular technique.
I am trying to create a type of ‘puzzle piece’ if you will. I want the bear and mountain to both be cut individually, however, I want the feet of the bear (where it overlaps the mountain) to fit back into the mountain, like a puzzle piece.
I’m sure there is a term for this, but not sure what that is to even YouTube it. !Any help on how to do this in Inkscape would be greatly appreciated.
Duplicate the bear, select one of the duplicates (if not already selected) and the mountain (use shift key to select more than one thing). Then choose the Path->Difference menu item.
edit rbtdanforth brings up a good point that you might not want to end up with two overlapping paths at the boundary between the bear and the mountain. That would cause the laser to traverse that boundary twice, so he just deletes part of the mountain’s path instead of differencing.
Path->Cut would achieve the same effect after deleting the cut out part.
I feel what we really need is optional automated deletion of overlapping paths.
If you went in to the node editing mode and editing the mountain create a node at each intersection and remove the line in between. When the line is cut it will .skip those bits of line that you removed
Thank you both for your help.
To clarify- do I use the break path at those intersection points where the bear and mountain meet? There will be a single line in the space between the bears front two and back two legs, correct? At that point do I ust Path -> Cut?
Process is the same:
Duplicate the bear, select one of the duplicates (if not already selected) and the mountain. Then choose Path->Cut menu item. Lastly, click on the mountain sections inside the bears legs (which are now cut out) and hit the delete key.
This doesn’t necessarily help you, but for those of you that may read this that use Illustrator, the Shapefinder tool was made for this (it’s how I integrate my custom pieces).
Yeah, ShapeBuilder is a slick little thing. Didn’t use it for years, then finally discovered it and it is one heck of a tool. (Wondered how you got the little hedgie into my puzzle so quickly.)
It’s good to have your artboard 20x12 since that is the size of the GFUI uses. If a design is on that artboard, it will always be in the same place in the bed.
Yes, and I know that but apparently I’m having a moment haha. I’ve been designing gears for a steam punk thingy all day and my brain must be getting tired.
Actually that will put two parts of the cut line on top of each other so they will be cut twice. Doing as I suggested will cut each part only once, as in
It may be the same thing in the two different programs. the copy I DL’d had the bear/ mountain interface each cut so it was duplicated. In Inkscape I removed those lines so had the same empty space as you show.
