Forum: Inkscape weird behavior of gear renderer

I make use of the gear renderer all the time and haven't run into this 
before, I don't think.  I am running 0.47, downloaded just today from 
inkscape.org, on mac OS X Leopoard.

When I render a gear, I cannot get the boolean operations to work with 
it.  So if I want to make a "hole" in the center of the gear, I can't 
put a circle there and do a difference operation to cut a circle into 
the center of the gear.

On 7/7/10 01:36, Elwin Estle wrote:
> import the gear .svg files into Blender for later 3D operations, this
> is something of a problem.  What am I doing wrong, or what is it
> about the gear paths that is preventing this?

The gear is inserted wrapped in a group - path operations (except
'Combine') do not work on groups (see the status line message giving a
hint why the operation failed).

Use 'Object > Ungroup' on the gear first before applying 'Path >
Difference'.


hth, ~suv

On Wed, 2010-07-07 at 01:54 +0200, ~suv wrote:
> > From a 2D standpoint, this would not be a big deal, but since I
> > import the gear .svg files into Blender for later 3D operations, this
> > is something of a problem.  What am I doing wrong, or what is it
> > about the gear paths that is preventing this?
> 
> The gear is inserted wrapped in a group - path operations (except
> 'Combine') do not work on groups (see the status line message giving a
> hint why the operation failed).

That's right, the gear is created with the origin at 0,0 and then the
group is translated. This is so it is easy to animate the gear by simply
rotating it.

> Use 'Object > Ungroup' on the gear first before applying 'Path >
> Difference'.

If one plans on animating the gear, it would be better to "Enter the
Group", and do the hole cutting operation while the Group is open. For
use in Blender it probably doesn't matter.

Tav