Hi Friends,
Wow, I am just absolutely captivated by the Spirograph Effect -- I just can't leave it alone!!

Anyway, I was trying "sculpt nodes" on a spirograph path, i.e. -- select all the nodes that you want to be sculpted, then holding down the Alt key, grab the node that you want to "lead" the sculpting, and drag it until you've achieved what you want.

I can't get it to work on Spirograph Effect created paths. Is that by design, or a bug?

Thanks as always for your wise and accomplished advice

I created a simple 5 point spirograph and node sculpting works fine.

Note that spirographs aren't spirograph objects in the same way a rectangle created with is a rectangle object. A spirograph is no different to any other object you create with or . It's just a normal path whose nodes are positioned to create a spirograph.

So when you say something doesn't work on a spirograph, the same must be true with any other path whether it was generated using the spirograph effect or not. This might help you identify why it's not working as you expect.

You didn't say how it's not working, but perhaps you've selected nodes that are in a position that reduces the effect.

So when you say something doesn't work on a spirograph, the same must be true with any other path whether it was generated using the spirograph effect or not. This might help you identify why it's not working as you expect.

I'm not sure what you mean....well, I know you mean that I should test something out on a or made path, to help identify the problem. But I don't understand the "must" Are you saying that the spirograph paths are absolutely identical to pencil or pen paths, in every way, except for their shape, i.e. - the number, type, and placement of their nodes?

Then why don't they make it a tool? And put the settings in the tool control bar? You know me I just don't...Inkscape is so complex, and even after all the work I've done to try and learn it...I mean, I don't think I even have a good handle on the basics yet So I thought being in the Effects menu, it must be so much more ccomplicated than the tools, and even though it looks like simple paths, I assumed it must be fundamentally different than the basic tools.

So anyway, I think you're probably right that I was selecting the wrong nodes needed to achieve what I wanted. They appeared to move as one, as if I didn't use Alt, or as if Alt wasn't working on the nodes. And I actually tried many times, on 6 or 8 different spirograms. Then tonight I finally found a spirogram in which I can fairly easily identify and select sequential nodes. So I can see that it IS working!

Well, sorry for putting this in the wrong forum at 1st. I'm learning, one step at a time
And thanks for your help micro, I do appreciate it.

I think what microUgly was trying to convey was, that rectangle tool, circle tool, etc. all give a product that is specific -> circle has a handle for making it a segment, rectangle has one for rounding the corners etc. If you take a circle and do Path-> Object to Path , the former CircleObject then becomes a Path that happens to be a circle... The Spirograph Effect computes where the nodes need to be, and then paints a path there. But the result is not a SpiroObject, so there are no special handles for altering outer ring radius or something. Likewise, all operations on the spirogram are simply operations on a path that happens to look like a spirogram.

My own two cent:
There is a slight lagging noticeabe, but otherwise Alt+click works fine on the spiros from 1219574221.svg - i sculpted the entire lower twothirds of the purple/green one, number of nodes selected does not seem to be factor for lagging. (5 nodes same as all the nodes)

Interestingly, simply displacing a lot of nodes seems to be even more taxing - lag is about 5 seconds there for the lower half of the spiro. Lag time depends on number of nodes here, so for 1-10 nodes there is only slight lagging.

Heeding microUglys comment about spiros being normal paths, i created a node monster by scribbling , and then doing Effects->Modify Path->Add Nodes. The resulting behemoth slowed everything to a crawl, but displacing and shaping had no lagging (right after the cursor moved, the first effects were vivible - the whole thing was slow, had rendering issues etc, but there was no pause from first cursor movement to first object movement).
Another node monster, this one with very few nodes per path, but a lot of path, had some lagging issues! So perhaps it is dependent on how much path there is to compute?