So there I am minding my own business and this wild maxi pad appears on my screen...
Nope, that seems bloody severe, will need to nip that in the butt. I was going to play with Inkscapes mesh fill tool but then I happened on some optical illusions and thought cool, I wanna do that.
Some white trash yelling at a house somewhere near interrupted my train of thought. Heard the one piece of shit yelling when last did I hit you as evidence of not having hit the other white trash. They scream loud enough so I assume a neighbour will go visit for tea. Then it seems mom must come fetch her and apparently the brother must go with. Why do people even fight. Anyway not enough info I will just get mean and hope both get shot just to be on the safe side. Avoid any future breeding.
Where was I?
Ah, yes. Optical failure. SO I leave the mesh fill and worm on a leaf idea I had to test that and instead attempt to replicate one of the patterns I found. It seemed simple enough right, the white and black edges determine the direction from what I could figure and it also turns out the hexagon is not required it can really be any shape so long as the white and black is present.
I proceed to make the hexagon anyhow because the first step is to get a group of that going then do the deform. The deform will give the depth and further enhance the 3d aspect of the image. But how?
Not how does it do it. I don't know I don't care, it just does. Ok, now that we have interruptions out of the way. I need to deform an entire group of these objects to curve and create the illusion of depth and movement. Doing it individually is a pain in the arse and was never going to happen.
I know in CorelDraw I could envelope an entire group and the individual objects would be deformed according to their position so you can easily make the center ones more narrow and outer ones wider faking perspective and shape.
Inkscape decided this was too cool and sure it will do it for you on a group but it will deform each item in place and not consider the bigger damn picture. It really is tough when even your software is a simpleton.
Before getting to that part you also need to get through the gauntlet of cloning so many items into a pattern. This is hidden under the edit->clone->create tiled clones menu which is actually very powerful but still took me 5 minutes to figure out make 20 copies spread into a grid 5 x 4 with spacing between each.
I just realized I also never added the shift for every second row, no matter I still failed. Acceptance is the final step.
Since Inkscape also decided that working with 200 objects is not something it was feeling up to, it crashed and now we get to look at our Maxi pad design again. Not saying it is related to why it was not feeling up to it but you may decide for yourself.
For the sake of seeming thorough I will quickly explain how to still deform all those items and then split them into the white and black edges we need for the image. Here we go...
Make some coffee, once that is done light a smoke then stare at the screen for about twenty seconds. Get up, go have a wee from the previous coffee then get back to the screen and click something. Ok, now after cloning the objects into a grid you need you will need to unlink the original item that got repeated because it will make it all go wonky like that one aunty down the road. This is also fantastically hidden in the edit menu, happy hunting.
Once cloned and you have a grid of items the size you need then combine them and go to path->path effects then add the envelope deformation effect this will let you move points and the whole object will shape according. Like bringing the top inward it will make the inside sections squish. Then when you are all done playing with that, break the items apart and you will manually have to group and color each white and black section then fill all the centers.
Now I realize that does not help anyone and maybe I will do a proper tutorial but not today because I gave up eventually by the hassle of managing all these items but mostly each time I wanted to change the deformation it was a chore. I am not Amish so I do not care for chores.
I also realized that I can just make a single flat grid of the items I want move them into Blender 3D use them as a texture on standard 3D objects and have the same thing done in 20 minutes.
Not for nothing.
After Inkscape crashed I did persevere and made something I could maybe actually finish since at this point I am not so sure Inkscape is the simpleton anymore.
Blue Confuckulation