09/11/2018 nicu's FOSS'n'stuff: F10 Gears: Drawing the Gears

F10 Gears: Drawing the Gears

While I am still thinking about putting back some blue on the Gears theme proposal for Fedora 10
(and, of course, while counting down the few days remaining until the upcoming Fedora 9 release)
here is a short howto about drawing gears, so anyone can learn to make them.

In fact drawing gears is not hard at all, I cheat and use an effect included in the recently released
Inkscape 0.46 (available both in F8 and F9) Effects > Render > Gears:

A few parameters to adjust (with Live Preview enabled to see their effect in real time) and we get a
toothed wheel:

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Now add a circle:

And use the Align and Distribute dialog to align it to the center (I used here "e;Relative to: Biggest
Item"):

Then substract the circle from the wheel (you may need to upgroup once, as the Gear effect greated
the wheel as a group):

Now to create spokes. Add a rectangle and align it to the center:

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Duplicate the rectangle and rotate it 90°:

Select both rectangles and rotate them freely:

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Select everything and do an union:

For the middle of the gear create a small circle, align it to the center and do another union:

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The hole for the axis is another circle aligned to the center and substracted from the wheel:

And the first gear is done!

Another gears coupled with it must have similar teeth, so use the Gear plugin and change only the
number of teeth:

And do a complex mechanism:

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You may want to increase the complexity further by adding some parallel gears, which may have their
own parameters (as long as they are not coupled with the initial gears):

And that was all for today! Expect a follow-up (maybe next week) about coloring those gears.

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