Hello there everybody

I had this idea about basically creating an opened padlock made out of binary code (a bit like the ones made out of the matrix effect, but not animated, nor with the matrix background), thing is just I need the numbers to be of two different colours, of different sizes, of different opacity and in different positions, but without overlapping onto and into each other and as random as possible, also, I would like to make some kind of depth effect with the number, it's not indispensable, but I have the impression that it would look cooler. I could do something close to this manually, step by step, but it kind of requires more time and it's also not so flexible as you can imagine. So, I would like to know here if there are better ways that I'm not aware of to reach this goal?

Thank you in advance, everybody!

Welcome to the forum!

I think the best tool for this is Create tiled clones...

http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/html/Tiles.html

Go over all the cases and you'll get a great sense of what it can do.

Spray tool in 0.92 will be able to do a lot of this, too.

Many thanks!

Hey, prkos, thanks for your tip, it gets quite close actually and after experimenting around mostly with scale and shift, I've come to a effect that quite gives the perception of depth, now I only need to have mixed colors with red and green and play a little bit with some random opacity, if it doesn't hurt the balance of the depth effect too much. But, anyhow, do you have or does anybody know about some setting that could play well with what I want to do? My thing now would also be how to put this tiled clones in a shape, so that they fill it, but without overlapping any of its shapes, lines and angles and so use this shape simply to have my numbers structured in that shape, but without needing then the lines of the real shaping-shape anymore thereafter. Since with tiled clones I'm able to kind of re-create the effect but not really to build up any kind of a little bit more complex shape like a padlock. Any suggestion in this regard?

Hey, thanks to you too Moini, however, I have tried the Spray tool in Inkscape and while it's quite funny to use, its effect are also too unpredictable and I didn't find really a way to kind of play with them enough as to create different kind of effects in a way that is reliable and reproducible, for what I want to do. But, maybe there are other alternative ways to use, or combine this tool so that I can really use it to achieve a closer result? If so, please, point them to be, would be great.

See the videos for the next version to understand better (0.92 is not yet released, the improvements will be in that version): http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php ... Spray_tool (it also has the non-overlap functionality you've been asking for)

Hm, it looks quite great actually and it really gives the impression like the Spray tool will then be able to apply all the effects of the tiled clones and even without overlapping other shapes if needed. The thing I was wondering about is that in the video you can see that under the Trace tab of the Tiled Clones menu there is this option called "3. Apply to tiled clones" and there I see just 4 options and while I guess that the Size option in there can reference to the Shift tab selected values, I'm still wondering what about Shift and Symmetry then? So, is every options you selected for the tiled clones applied through the Spray tool, through this Trace tab, or only some are? Anyhow, do you know, or does anybody know when this 0.92 release will actually come out? Because I can wait a bit, but not too long.

All checked options are applied in parallel.
You can try it out yourself: https://inkscape.org/en/download/development-versions/

Tiled clones can react with opacity and color, have you tried it?

To make the drawing appear only inside the area of a path you can use Clipping:
http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL ... pping.html

or maybe you want to create a pattern out of the group:
http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL ... s-Patterns