Scratch Building with Inkscape: Textures - your questions answered

Using textures in Inkscape is a wonderful way to construct your card buildings when you are scratch building for your model railway, whether you model in N Gauge, 00 Gauge, O Gauge, or just about any scale.

Textures let you fill your drawing shapes with realistic or photographic surfaces to make your scratch built buildings have an added sense of realism.

There can be some challenges with Inkscape when you are working with textures, and there are techniques you can use to improve your textures by adding an extra layer of 3D realism. In this video I show you how.

In this video I answer three questions that have been posed by viewers in the comments sections of my recent videos. These texture-based Inkscape questions are:

ADDING 3D EFFECTS:
How I used a simple technique on my scratch-built iron girder bridge to make the rusty old girders look like real 3D I-beams rather than simple printed bits of card.

TILING SMALL DOWNLOADED TEXTURES:
I show you how you can take a downloaded texture file and tile it many times to fill a shape for your model building scratch-build, and some hints to make this the right size for your scale, and keep it the right size. Repeatedly joining a downloaded texture to itself is really simple using the Pattern tool.

KEEPING FILE SIZES SMALL:
If you have used textures in Inkscape before, you may have found that the Inkscape SVG file can get very large. Large files are slow to open and slow to save. Copy and paste is also affected. In this final answer, I show you three tips that you can use to keep your file sizes small when you are working with textures in Inkscape for your own scratch-built card buildings, including an introduction to the Clone tool.

Please consider giving this video a thumbs up, as this is the only way I can tell that my videos are useful, and it encourages me to make more videos in future. Thanks for watching!

If any of my videos have helped you learn Inkscape, or inspired you to use Inkscape for your own buildings, please let me know. I'd love to feature your buildings on a future video.

00:00 Add 3D effects
08:21 Tiling downloaded textures
17:14 Keeping file sizes small