Hello,
I'm pretty brand new to Inkscape. I've only been using it for about a week now. I'm creating a 2d video game sprite who will be animated in a program called Spriter. Spriter requires all of the body parts to be individual PNG files. So I have her upper arms, upper legs, torso, pelvis, neck, head, etc. Later there will be variations on those as well. ^ ^

My problem is that I've made quite a few shapes as paths, colored them all and then decided I wanted them to be combined into one. For example making all the individual parts of the eye (iris, sclera, pupil, highlights)-- and wanting to later combine them into one object with all the colors they had originally. However, when I use "Union" or "Combine", it makes the whole thing one color and deforms it. Grouping isn't a problem, but I can't use path effects after that. I can't imagine there's absolutely no way besides Group to flatten several detailed objects into one that looks the same and still have it be a path. Is there really nothing?

Above is an imgur link to a largely unfinished shot of my character's face. The eye and all it's pieces are currently a group and I'd love it all to just be one path. Same with the flower, which is several separately gradient-filled objects grouped together.

Any ideas? Am I just missing something?

-Eva

Hi.

After grouping the objects, they still remain the same.
You can enter the group by double clicking on it or pressing Ctrl+Enter when it is selected.
Or use the node editor tool to select the parts inside any group.

To exit the group click on an object outside of the group or press Ctrl+Backspace.

An idea apart that, in my opinion it would look better if you didn't add an alpha value to the stroke colour of the hair.

Ah, okay, so it's just that I can't use the path effects on the group as a whole, but I can on the individual paths inside? Say I wanted to take a big circular chunk out of the flower with the "difference" option under Paths. Could you do this? Or is there no way to treat the whole flower like a path (since Difference only works with exactly two paths)?

And thank you for the advice on the hair. ^ ^

You can only define attibutes on the stroke and fill on the objects inside globally by setting them for the group. -and add them transformation equally.
(Blurring is a tricky part, because it can added to the whole group, but once it is ungrouped, the blur values will end up different)

To take only a part of the group, you can use clipping.
To clip a part of the image more than twice, you have to group the objects before each clipping.

Well if it was for adding live path effects to those clipped parts, it won't solve the problem.
Probably those parts would be best combined together, and unnecessary parts edited out with the node editor tool.
Also reverse the parts of the compound path if necessary to reverse the pattern's direction.

Alright, thank you for the help!