Transcripts
1. Introduction - 20 3D tips for Adobe Illustrator: Hello and welcome to this class, 20 tips for working with the new 3D tools in
Adobe Illustrator. My name's Helen Bradley and
I'm a Skillshare top teacher. I have over 270 courses
here on Skillshare and over 168 thousand
student enrollments. In this class, we'll look at
tips and tricks for using the new 3D tools in
Adobe Illustrator. These tools work
very differently to the older tools which are now still there but called classic. I'll explain to you how
to create 3D objects, how to light them and add
materials to their surfaces. I'll also explain what you can and cannot do with
these objects. And I think that some
of these things are going to be a surprise to you. By the time you've
finished this course, you will have made a good
start towards working with the new 3D tools in
Adobe Illustrator. And you'll have learned some additional
tips and techniques for working with
Illustrator every day too. So without further ado, let's get started with the new 3D tools in
Adobe Illustrator.
2. Before We Begin: Before we begin
these tips on using the new 3D tools in
Adobe Illustrator, I'm going to jump forward
to something we're gonna be covering in one
of these tips. And that is that these new 3D tools are
really processor intensive. So when you're creating
a new file to use, I suggest that you create
something really quite small. In this case, I'm going
to create a file that still has the 1920
by 1080 proportions. But I'm going to make one that's 480 by 270 pixels in size. A very small file that's going to scale up on
the screen so I can see everything very clearly. But it's going to be a lot
to my computer's processor. I'm going to get things
to render much more quickly by using a
small file size. So heads up, if you're
following along, make sure to choose a very
small file size to work with. Otherwise, you may find
that your computer crashes. Of course, if you
do have problems, there are a few things
that you can do. Firstly, restart your computer and particularly a
Windows computer, you can get better results with a computer that has just
recently been restarted. Also close down
absolutely everything that you don't need
to have open so that your processor can
focus on dealing with Illustrator and
the overhead that these new 3D tools have.
3. Tip 1 - Find the Old 3D Tools: The first of our tips is that
you don't actually have to be using these new 3D tools
in Adobe Illustrator. The new 3D tools were
launched in about April 2022, but the old ones still exist. So let me just show
you if you're watching a class that uses
the older tools or a teacher or suggesting you use tools and they
don't look like the ones that you
get to when you choose Window 3D and materials, which is the new panel, then you can find the old tools, but you'll find them
somewhere differently than perhaps that teacher
has told you to find them. Just be aware of this. Here's where you find them
Effect 3D and materials. And here are what
are the old tools? They're now called 3D classic, Extrude and Bevel,
revolve and rotate. It's really unlikely that
this will be removed from upcoming versions of Illustrator because they are so different. These tools result in very different things
than the new tools do. So the two can coexist
and in many cases, you may want to use the old
tools because they were simply more powerful
in a lot of instances. Now these same features are also available from
the appearance panel. So if you choose
Window and appearance, you can get to the
appearance panel with your shapes selected. Click on f x, go to 3D and materials. And he had two are
the classic versions of Extrude and Bevel,
revolve and rotate. So you can follow
along with classes that were produced
in earlier versions of Illustrator that
use what are now the classic 3D
tools quite easily, just so long as
you realize where you're going to
find those tools.
4. Tip 2 - The Basics of the New 3D Tools: Tip two is looking at the
basics of the new 3D tools. I'm going to create a hexagon. So I'm going to
the Polygon tool, I'll click once in the document, I'm going to create
a six-sided polygon. It doesn't have a stroke, it does have a fill. To use the new 3D tools, I'm going to use Window
3D and materials. The first thing you'll want
to select is your object and then the type of 3D
effect that you want, for example, inflate is going
to give it a inflated look. Let me just change this to off-axis front so that you can
see what's happening here. You can see that it's
got a bubble front. You can use revolve. It probably won't be what you want here for this
particular shape, but we will be using it
elsewhere in this class. And you can also use extrude, which allows you to
extrude a shape. So we've got our polygon shape, but it's extruded into something more like a cylinder
if you like. Because I've added
some depth here, we've actually got some
depth on this extrusion. Volume is going
to flatten there. So we can have a very flat
affect or we can have something that is a little bit more robust and a
little bit rounder. And if we go all the
way up on inflation, then we get a bubble
front on our shape. If I bring the depth
all the way back to 0, I can inflate both sides. So shape is going to be inflated on both
sides of our polygon. Once you've determined
the type of 3D effect you're
going to be using. You can go across two materials. And here you have access to
some built-in materials, as well as the ability
to just go with the material that
you already have. You can also use graphics
and we're going to say how we can do
that in a later tip. But let's for now just choose
a material for our shape. Let's choose this sort
of gold material. They can say that our shape now has a gold material surface. And finally, you'll want
to go to a lighting. And with lighting you can
change how the object is late. You can move the light around. You can adjust the
intensity of the light. You can adjust its
rotation to position it elsewhere over your
object and its height. And also the softness. Now softness is particularly
going to impact shadows. Ambient light is not the light itself that's shining on the object that's
like the room light. It's like the light that
is in the atmosphere. And so you can make that
more or less intense. Let's go to shadows here. I'm going to turn shadows on. Can say that behind object is rendering
the shadow up here. Let's go and place
it below our object. I can change the distance
from the object, but you'll see that you'll
start to get things cut off. And that is a feature. Well, a feature
or a problem with this new 3D tool is that it does tend to cut your shadows
off from time to time. You'll find that in particular, if you decrease
your shadow bound, you'll get your shadow cut off. I've got a nice
soft shadow here, but you know what, we're not
saying any of that at all. And the reason for
that is that I haven't actually rendered
this 3D effect. So you can do that
by just clicking up here on render with ray tracing. And when you do, the shape is actually rendered and you can see now our shadow is
very, very soft indeed. There the basics of working with the new 3D tools in Adobe
Illustrator course. We're going to
investigate these in more detail in further tips.
5. Tip 3 - Rendering and the Basic Rendering Settings: Tip three involves using the rendering settings
in the new 3D tools. Let's go back and let's
inflate that this shapes. I've just got the inflation
set to 100 per cent. I'm going to inflate
both sides and I'm going to bring
the depth back to 0. I'm going to choose off-axis
front for my rendering. So you can see that we've got
an interesting rendering, a 3D rendering here
on our star shape. I'm going to materials
because I want to add some shine to this at the moment it's set
to some roughness. I'm going to drag back on
the roughness here to 0, so it will ultimately
get a shine. Let's go to lighting and
just set up our lighting. I like mine to come from
the top-left typically, but I don't like that at all. So let's just go with something
a little bit different. I'm going to turn on my shadows. Let's choose below object. Going to increase my shadow
bound to make sure that I get at least a chance of getting the shadow to render properly. Don't think it's going to, but we'll give it a shot. So I'm now ready to
render my shape. If I go up here, I have some options
for my ray tracing. I have low, medium, and high, and typically you will find that low is all that you need. You probably don't need
it to be any greater, and certainly you don't want to be setting medium and
high if you've got a large object or a number
of objects to render because your computer will
suffer and it may crash. I'm just going to do a
low quality render here. I'll just click on Render. Once you've done your
first rendering, you'll notice that
this is already set to real-time preview. So if I make changes to
the object at this point, they're going to be
rendered automatically. So let's, for example, bring down our softness. And you can say
that the rendering has happened all over again. It's sort of like
a live rendering. Again, if you have
that set to too high, if you have it set to
a high value here, then it's going to take
forever every time you make a change to your shape and you don't want
to be doing that. If you want to be working in a live shape and making
changes as you go, you'll want that low quality
rendering so that you're not waiting for ages for the
renderings to take place.
6. Tip 4 - X Y Z and Perspective Rotations: Tip four is adjusting the placement and
rotation of your object. So if prompt the object area of the 3D and Materials panel, you have a number of presets
that you can choose. Each one of these
is going to change the position of your object. And sometimes using
the presets as the simplest way of managing the placement
of your object, but you can do it
manually as well. You have this
little widget here. But crossline is the x-axis, the up and down
line is the y-axis, and this is the z axis, a circle around the edge. So you can come in here and
just adjust the x-axis, the y-axis by simply
dragging on them. And then we can adjust the
rotation using the z axis. Obviously, that's had a
rather profound effect on our shadow and not a
particularly good one. You can also get to those
same settings here. So you could adjust
the z axis by just dragging on
this slider here. And then you've got the y-axis
and your x-axis as well. Here too, you have a
perspective settings. So let's just go to
where we can see our shape and you can
adjust its perspective.
7. Tip 5 - Create a Sphere from a Half Circle: Tip five is creating a
sphere from a half circle. I'm going to create a circle
using the ellipse tool. Hold the Shift key down, I'll fill it with a color. So I have a pink color here and I'm going to remove its stroke. I want just half a circle. So I'm going to the direct
selection tool up here. I'm going to select over just this anchor point
here and press Delete. So I have a half circle. Half circle can be rotated
around to create a sphere. So with it selected and with the 3D and Materials panel open, of course, we're getting
to that by choosing Window 3D and materials. I'm going to choose Revolve. Revolve revolves this shape, but it revolves around one or other of its left or
right edge as well. We're revolving
around its left edge and this is what we're getting. If we change this
setting to right edge, then we get our sphere. We have a full 360 revolve here, but we could bring it
back to being less of a full revolve if we
don't want a sphere, but I do want a sphere and offset is going to
give us a doughnut. Well, a sort of a
doughnut thing. I'm not going to set any offset because I did come here to make a sphere with my rotation, I can select that a
different rotation. So isometric, right? Or off access France, They just going to
change the way that the lighting appears on this
object because the sphere, the rotation of a sphere isn't really something that's
going to give us a different book to
the shape because it is basically just a sphere. I'm going to materials, I'm going to settle for the
look that I've got here, but I do want it to be shiny. So I'm going down to base
properties and opening up this base properties panel here with the little triangle and bringing the
roughness down to 0. Of course, this isn't
rendering yet because we haven't asked
it to be rendered. Let's go to lighting. And I like my lighting to
come from the top-left. I'm going to soften this so
that I can get my shadow out. If I want a shadow, then I'll turn on my shadows. Choose behind object
or below object. I prefer mine to
come from below. And I'm going to
make it really soft because that's the
kind of shadow I like. Of course, none of this
has been rendered. So let's go up here and
random width ray tracing. The result is our sphere, but it is just a half circle
that has been revolved. If I go to the appearance
panel here and turn off this 3D and
materials effect, we're just back to our
original half circle shape.
8. Tip 6 - A Sphere From A Circle: Tip six is to create a
sphere from a circle. This time, I'm just going
to drag out a circle again. I'm using the Shift
key to make sure that I'm constraining my shape
to a perfect circle. I'll choose a turquoise color. I'm going to remove the
stroke from this object. This time, I'll create my
sphere from the circle. I'll go across here
to the Object menu. I'm going to choose
inflate and I want the inflation to
beat 100 per cent. Now you might be
tempted to adjust the depth to get a
better inflation, but that's not going to
have the desired effect. Let's go to off-axis front
and see what happened. So depth has to do with the
depth of the extrusion. Right now, we've
got something that is sort of halfway
to what we want. We've got a half circle
that has been inflated. So let's inflate both sides
and that gives us our sphere. So we can rotate it
around and we can move it on its x
and y axes here. Let me just grab
this y-axis here. Of course, we can
also just go here and choose something
like off-axis front, which is a nice sort of
presentation for a sphere. I'll go back and
do the same things as I've been doing
with my spheres, is to just add some
shininess by removing the roughness and then just adjusting the lighting to suit. Bring up the softness here. And if I want a shadow, then of course I'm going
to turn on my shadow, choose the shadow that I want. Make sure the shadow bands are large enough that
we're going to trap this entire shadow when we go ahead and just render our shape. We now have a sphere
that has been created from a circle
which has been inflated, sort of like a balloon, which is a different way
of approaching the task To revolving a half circle
to create a sphere. But the result visually
is pretty much the same.
9. Tip 7 - Working With Materials: The seventh tip involves using
materials on your surface. I'm going to re-select
my object here. This is the severe
that was created from a circle which has been
inflated on both sides. But the same principles going to work for most of your shapes. I'm going to the
materials panel. We're just using the
default at the moment, but we have access to a whole
heap of materials here. To apply a material to a shape, you just click on the material. You can see here that the
pattern or the material here in the diagram looks
a lot different to the material actually
in use on my shape. I can adjust that
using the properties. So let me just open up
the Properties panel. Every single one of these patterns will have a
different set of properties. So you'll probably
need to experiment a bit to get the results
that you're looking for. In my case, I want my material
to look more like this. So I'm going to increase
the number of repeats. That's having a better
result on my design. I'm a little bit worried
about this edge effect. I might need to change some
of the rotation to get rid of that so that it's
not as obvious. Back in materials,
there will often be a way of changing the
color of a material, particularly if color is implied in the material
like the marble paint, then that's obviously something
that could potentially be recolored. Let's do that. Let's go and see what
marble paint gives us. Well, down here are the colors that are in
use in the painting. If you want to change
one or any of them, then you can do so. Going to bring in
some sort of yellow into what were the
paler blue areas. And you can see
that I'm changing the color of this marble. Some designs will
allow you to change color on simply a sliding scale. So just be aware that they're going to be different settings available for every single one of the materials
that you're using. Once you have
applied a material, if it's not looking the way that you think the shape should look, don't hesitate to come up here and render your shape again, just making sure
that you're getting the dimension in the shape
that you expect to see.
10. Tip 8 - 3D and Lines: Tip number eight, it
involves using the line as a 3D object rather
than an object itself. I'm going to the pen tool here. I'm just going to
click to create something that is
reminiscent of the letter W. I'm going to press
Escape to finish. I'm going to select
over my shape. I don't want her to have a fill, so I'm going to turn off
the fill at this point. But I do want to increase
the stroke considerably. So I'm going to beef up the
stroke and let's just change its color to something that's
going to be easier to see. Now, also in the
Stroke panel here I can change the way the
ends are on these lines. So the cut ends, these two here can be
rounded using the caps. And if I wanted to round
these areas down here, I can just click
here on corners. But you can choose what
you do with your shape. Now that we've got our shape, I'm going to Window
and then 3D materials. And I'm going to object
because that's where we start. I'm going to click on inflate. I don't want it to
have a lot of depth, but I do want it to
be a 100 per cent in terms of volume and I
will inflate both sides. So it is sort of like
a blown-up letter W. If I choose off-axis front here
you'll see our shape now. The depth has just
blown out again, just removing that
so that we just have blown up letter W. So this is a line that has had
a 3D effect applied to it. And you can add a shadow in the same way as we've
been adding shadows. I'm going to add this
below the object, increase the shadow bands
to give myself a chance at this shadow actually being
able to be rendered. And let's just render it. So everything's looking
really good here. Now, one of the things
you can do in 3D is you can alter the original shape
while you're working on it. So what I'm gonna
do is go here to the fill and I'm going to
apply a sort of pink fill, which is going to fill up
these areas here in my shape. And as you can see, that's also had the
effect of applying a 3D element to these
filled areas of the shape. If we have a look and see what the shape looks like
without the 3D, this is what we've got. And when we apply
our 3D effect to it, we've got this sort of
dimensional look where the fill areas and the stroke have been treated
as two separate objects. And so we're going to
see that elsewhere in these tips because
that is very typical of 3D objects in
Illustrator is having this sort of dimensional
look to your 3D effect.
11. Tip 9 - Editing a Shape with a 3D Effect Applied: Tip number nine is
going to build on the previous tip and we're
going to look at how we can adjust shapes
while they're actually having the 3D
effect applied to them. I'm just going to drag
out a square here. That's a rectangle created
by holding the Shift key. It's got a pill, it
has no stroke going to select it and let's
apply the 3D effect to it. So I'm going to 3D materials, I'm going to object, I'm going to inflate
this a 100%, going to reduce the depth to
0 and inflate both sides. I've got something equivalent to a pillow here, if you like. I'm also going to look at a slightly different
lighting effect. Maybe adjust the height a bit
and increase the softness. And I'm going to render
this by just clicking the render with ray
tracing option. So we have at the base of
this shape a rectangle. And you can see here that there are the corner
widgets that we would be used to sing on any
rectangle that we created. We can drag in on those corner widgets
to change the shape. So now we've got something
that's a bit more like a pastel, if you like. And I can drag it out so it becomes a different
shape entirely. At this point, I'd
like to create a more hollow shapes
with my shape selected. I'm going to duplicate it. I'll choose Edit Copy and
then Edit Paste in Place. That's pretty important
because I want my second copy to be
right on top of a first, I'm going to hold Shift and Alt and Shift Option on a Mac, and I'm just going to drag in. So I have two shapes on
top of each other here. I'm going to select
everything and go here to the
shape builder tool. Because using the
shape builder tool, I can cut one shape
out of another. I'm going to hold the Alt
key that would be option on a Mac and just drag
through this center shape. And what I've done is I've cut that shape from the inside
of the other shape. So we've got a shape that
has a hole in the middle, but the entire 3D
effect is still being applied to
that compound shape. So you can do all sorts of
things with your shapes while you are actually
creating 3D effects. And then the 3D effect
is going to be applied to the resulting shape
that you create.
12. Tip 10 - Higher Quality Rendering: Tip number ten,
we're going to look at the things that
are going to affect the quality of your render and why you may not
even want to use them. I'm going to create a rotated object here
using the revolve tool. I'm going to revolve
from the right edge, so I have my sphere. Now when we're going to
apply a ray tracing, we can click here on
render with ray tracing, but there are options here in terms of the quality
that we can use. I'm turning on ray tracing. We will see that we have
low, medium and high. Typically you'll find that low. It's probably all that you need. If you use high than the rendering is going
to take a lot longer. And depending on the
size of the object or the number of objects
that you're rendering. This could be quite an
overhead on your computer. I'm just going to
render this out and we'll see if we
see the dialogue. Well, we didn't
see the dialogue, but typically if there was
a lot of work to be done, I would be saying a
progress dialogue here. Now you can also see
inside the ray tracing dialogue here that there is a setting for Raster Settings. This is the raster
effects settings for the entire document. And by default it'll be set
to something like 72 PPI. You can set it to 300
ppi, but that again, is going to take a
whole lot longer for the ray tracing
to take place. So let me just render this. It's not stopping this
particular computer. But again, if you have
a lot of objects, we would find that this
high-quality setting is probably far in excess
of what you would want. But if you are finding that your quality is not high enough, then it is going to be
controlled by two things. Firstly, the quality
of the ray tracing set here in this dialog,
and secondly, the raster settings
which you can get to by clicking here or there also available in effect and Document Raster Settings and you
can set them too high, or there are other values,
medium and screen. Screen is typically the
value that you'll have, but I've just set mine to 300 or high for this
particular document.
13. Tip 11 - Expanding a 3D Shape: Tip number 11 involves
expanding a rendered object. If you've used the previous, the classic 3D tools
in Adobe Illustrator, you may recall that when
you expand it an object, you got a whole lot
of vector objects. This new 3D tool does
not work the same way and that's a really critical
thing to understand. So I've got my object ray trace. So let's just confirm that it's a high setting way
more than I need. I'll click on Render. This has now been rendered. If I want to expand this, I can do so. Let me just make a
duplicate of it so that we can see What's going on here. So we're going to keep
an unexpanded version of the object over here. And let's expand this one. I'll choose Object,
Expand Appearance. We'll go to the Layers
panel and see what we got. Well, this shape here is just our half circle with
a revolve applied to it. It's a 3D effect
which can be removed from it just using
the appearance panel. Let me just set
that back on again. This shape is something completely different
and it's very different to what we would
have had had we used the older classic 3D tools
in Adobe Illustrator. Because what we have
here is just an image. This is a bitmap image. So this is what the new
3D tools expand into. They expand into a picture. There are no vector shapes here that are accessible to us. It's just a picture
inside a group. So this is really
critical to understand. This is no longer editable. We can even change its color, is basically as soon
as you expand that, that shape that has a 3D effect applied to
it, all bets are off. You are limited in what
you can do this shape, and it just expands
into a picture.
14. Tip 12 - Render as Vector and Expand: Tip number 12
involves rendering as a vector and expanding
your object. So in the previous video, we just rendered
the 3D object as usual and expanded at using
Object Expand Appearance. And what we got as a
result was an image. But we still have
our original path. So I'm going to grab my original path and I'm going
to make a duplicate of it. So I'm just going to hold
the Alt or Option key as I drag it another
duplicate away. Now, this one, I'm going to
render as a vector because there is an option in the new
3D tools to do just that. But again, the result of
this is going to be very different to the classic
3D tools in Illustrator. So I'm just going to do
a low quality rendering, but I am going to
choose here render as vector and I will click Render. Having done that, I'm
now going to expand this shape with Object
and Expand Appearance. Now we get something different but not
particularly helpful. This time we get what's
called a non native art. Objects are this is
a non native art and it basically is just a picture
of the rendered 3D object, not much different to
this shape over here. Then we get a few
other bits and pieces, some paths here which are of negligible use because
they'd just lines. If we had had a shadow
on our original shape, we would have the shadow as an extra object here
inside this group. So basically rendering as a vector and then expanding
doesn't get us a long way further ahead than just rendering and
expanding our object. It's important to be
aware that there are these two options because
at a deeper level, you can do things with this object that you
can't do with this one. And we're going to
look at those shortly.
15. Tip 13 - 3D as a Graphic Style: Tip 13 involve saving a 3D
effect as a graphic style. I've got a circle here. I'm going to apply an
inflation effect to this. So I'm going to inflate it with a 0 depth than I'm going
to inflate both sides. I'm going to set up
my material so that I have the roughness set to 0, so it will be quite smooth. I'm going to apply some
lighting to my shape again, softening it so that I have a ability to get a
nice soft shadow. I'm going to drop
my shadow below my object and just increase the shadow bounds to make sure that I'm able
to see my shadow, I'll select OpEx as front so we can actually get a shadow
and I'll render this. Let me just check the settings. I'm on low quality,
that's just fine. I've rendered my 3D shape. I'm going to select
my shape and I'm going to my graphic
styles panel. If you don't see yours, you can just go to Window
and graphic styles. With my shape selected, I'm going to click the
plus sign and that will add it as a new graphic style. I can now apply it to my shapes. I'm going to make a
duplicate of this star because I want to
apply it in two ways. I'm going to click
on my star and click on my graphic style. And you'll see that I now have a 3D shape that has the exact same
properties as this one. It's off-axis front. It has a puffiness that is set to 0 depth and it's
inflated from both sides. But you'll see too that
my color has disappeared. And that's typical when
you use graphic styles. So let me just click
away from this. Sometimes you may find it a bit difficult to click
away from your object. If you do switch to the
Direct Selection Tool, click away from
your object because that seems to work just fine. And then you can go back to
your direct selection tool. Let me go back to this star and let's apply this same effect, but let's keep the
color of that object. To do that, I'm going to hold the Alt key that would be option on a Mac as I click
on my graphic style. And now I get all the
graphic style settings, the 3D effect, but the color of the object
is not affected. In this case, it's staying the same orangey yellow
color that I had originally. Let's do that to this shape. I wanted to keep my
color, Alt or Option. Click on my graphic style. And here we get a doughnut. Look again, I'm having trouble clicking
away from my shape. If I continue to have trouble, I'll just click on the
Direct Selection Tool because that's a way of
getting away from this. Now, if you want to save
your graphic style, it's going to be saved
within this document. If I were to save this document, but if you want to be
able to use it later on, you would come here to
the flyout menu and choose Save Graphic
Style Library. And that would save it as a graphic style library that
you could then open later on from the user-defined area here in open Graphic
Style Library. Because what Illustrator's
going to do is to save this by default in the
place that expects to find it when you
want to go and open it.
16. Tip 14 - 3D Objects inside Patterns: Tip 14 involves using
3D objects as patterns, using the pattern make tool. Let's start by creating a
3D object of this circle. Now I went ahead and
save that graphic style. So let's just go to
the flyout menu, open Graphic Style,
user-defined, and it's in a folder called 3D. Here is my graphic style. I'm going to Alt or Option, click on it to apply
it to that shape, keeping the color as it was. Now, I have my graphic style, but I'm thinking that I would
like to remove my shadow. I'm going back into the lighting area and I'm just going to delete the shadow. So I'm left with a sphere. I want to create a pattern
using this 3D sphere. It's all selected and
choose object pattern make. I'll click, okay. I'm going to increase the
spacing around this object. So just going to increase the width and
the height values. And I will use a
different style grid. I'll use brick by row. So basically this is what my pattern is going
to look like. I'll click Done. When we look at the
pattern itself, if I drag it out of
the swatches dialogue, we can have a look at the
objects inside the pattern. I'm going to just choose
the group selection tool. I'm just going to click
on this shape so we can investigate
what we have here. I'll go into the Layers panel, open up the document here and you'll see that
what Illustrator has done is it has
converted this live 3D object into a series of
images and other words, it's done the equivalent of choosing Object,
Expand, Appearance. So these are just images
inside the pattern. They no longer have
the ability to be recolored as easily as we could. For example, re-color
alive 3D object. So while you can use the 3D objects inside
patterns, inside Illustrator, just be aware that
they will no longer be 3D objects as soon as
they're saved as a patent, they will be expanded
into these images.
17. Tip 15 - Repeat Pattern with 3D Shape: Tip number 15 involves
using 3D objects inside the new pattern repeat
tool in Adobe Illustrator. I've already bought it in my 3D design here
as a graphic style. So with my shape selected, I'm just going to Alt or Option click to apply it to my shape. It does have a shadow on it, so let me just go and remove
the shadow while I'm here. I'm going to save this as another graphic style
because I'm finding that I'm using these a lot
with my shape selected. I'll just add it as a graphic style a little bit later on. I'm going to save it the
same way as I did this one. It will be available
anytime in the future. But right now we have
here a live 3D object. I'm just going to re-size it and we're going to use it inside
the new pattern tool. I'll choose object and then repeat it and I'm
going to use grid. I'll choose object
and then repeat and option so I can get access
to my repeat options. And I'm going to
change the look of the pattern and
just click, okay. Now, if you're unfamiliar with this way of creating patterns, I do have a class that is
on this and I'll link to it below so that you can learn how to use it if you're
not familiar with it. The important thing
to know is that this is not a seamless repeat. It's just an object that
is filled with a pattern. But these are still
live objects. So if I double-click on it, I get access to the
same tools as I would for changing the object if
it were not in a pattern. So for example, let's go
and change its color. So we'll make it the pink color. And of course, every
single object within this grid pattern
is going to change because that's how these
grid patterns work. So I'm just going
to click here to get out of that isolation mode. But here is our
pattern and it does have a live 3D effect
applied to it. So at any stage we can just double-click on one of
these shapes to isolate it, go into our 3D tools and we could change things
like the lighting of it. We could change the type of design we could change
if it was a star, for example, we could
change the rotation so we get something
more interesting. Perhaps, we can also
change the materials. Let's just go and apply
this material to our shape. Increase the number of repeats. Click away from this, and go back out of
isolation mode. And we have a pattern
this time with a material applied to our shape rather
than just the shiny color.
18. Tip 16 - Image and Non Native Art as Patterms: Tip number 16 involves investigating the
Repeat Grid feature just a little bit
more this time with objects that have
already been expanded. We're returning here
to the file that had objects in it that
had been expanded. This one was just a 3D
object that was expanded. So it's expanded into an image here it is
here, just an image. This one here was a vector
object that was expanded. So it's been expanded
into non native art. This was our control. So I'm going to just delete our control because we know that a 3D object can be used in
that repeat pattern grid. We've already covered that, so I'm just going
to delete that one. I'm going to take
my non native art out as a single object. I'm going to take my
image out as an object because I don't need
these other bits because they just nothing. They're not helping
things at all. But let's compare
the non native art, which is the object
that we get from a vector expansion with the image that we get from
just a regular expansion. So we're going to start
with the image first. I'll select it. I'm going to
size it down a little bit. First of all, I'm going
to choose Object. Repeat. And you'll see here
that it cannot be used as an object in
a repeat pattern. So that's really
quite interesting that the actual 3D object
could have been used, but there's expanded one cannot. Let's just talk that
to one side for now because we're going
to come back to it a little bit later. I'm just going to scale
down my non native art. You can see this as non
native ad that says so up here with it selected, I'm going to choose
object and then repeat. And here we can use a non
native art in our repeat. Not quite sure why it is that one can be used
and the other can't, but that's the way it's working. So as you can see here
and on native art as being able to be used
as a pattern repeat. But our image cannot. Just going to move
this one to one side. And let's come back to the image that is not
performing for us, that we cannot select
object and repeat and use. But we can, if we
created as a symbol, I'm going to my symbols panel. You can get there by choosing
window and then symbols. I'm going to select
my artwork and click the plus sign to
add it as a symbol, you can just click, Okay, it doesn't matter what
the settings are. The important thing is
that it is a symbol. Right now, this new symbol and this object here are linked. And because it's a symbol, then all of a sudden we can
add it to a repeat pattern. But again, just a
little bit confusing. But if you find that
you're not able to use an object inside a pattern and you want to be
able to use it. Sometimes dropping it inside the symbols panel will
solve your problem.
19. Tip 17 - Recolor Options and Limitations: Tip number 17 involves
re-coloring 3D objects. I have three
identical 3D objects. I'm going to draw three
different things to them. This one I'm going to
render as a vector. So I'm going to Window
3D and materials. I'm going to drop this
panel down and choose render as vector and
click to render it. Then I'm going to expand it with Object, Expand
Appearance, naught. Unsurprisingly, that's
going to lead us in the last pallet to have a
group with our non native art. This object is now a
piece of non native art. This one has already
been rendered just as a regular object. So I'm going to choose
Object Expand Appearance. This is going to
give us a image. So I'm just going
to take this out of its group because it doesn't
need to stay in there. So this one's an image. Just going to use the
non native art here. I don't need the
rest of this group. So I can just turn it
off and discard it. The last ellipse is actually
still intact pace of 3D art, so it hasn't had any
changes made to it. This one is the
easiest to re color. We could just click here and change the color by
selecting a different color. But perhaps more A's lay still. You could use the recolor
artwork dialogue. So I'm going to just adjust the color here by
just dragging around and I can do this live so I can
preview what the color is going to look like before
I actually select it. So that's one option
that you have. Another option we have with our shapes selected is to go to the appearance panel and hold the Shift key as we click
on this color selector, this gives us access
here to RGB colors. And we can also just drag across to select the color here. But we can also choose, for example, hue
saturation brightness. And this gives us
access to a hue slider. So there are a number
of different ways that you can get a live preview of what your color
is going to look like so that you're not
committing to a color and going, Oh, that's not what I wanted. And then having to reopen that color picker dialogue to
be aware of those options. For these other two shapes, there are limited
options available for this one practically
nothing at all. You can see when I select it, there is no color that
can be selected here. There's no re-color
artwork dialogue. I can go to edit and edit colors and see what's
happening here. Well, there are no
presets I can use. I could adjust the
color balance, I can convert it to grayscale. This is pretty
much all I can do. Adjusting the color
balance opens up this dialog where if
I click on preview, I can adjust the
colors in the image. This image is blue right now. If I add more blue, it's going to become bluer. If I remove blue, I'm going to add yellow, so it's going to
become more green. Green is opposite magenta
on the color wheel. So dragging on green to increase it is going
to make it more green. Removing green is
going to make it more magenta and mixing with the existing
color that's giving us sort of a purply blue. Red and cyan are
opposite each other. So if I add red, we're going to get more red. If I remove red, we're going to go
into the cyan colors. So here you could
adjust your color using the sliders by that is a
little bit hit and miss. You may not be able to find it quite as easy to
get the color that you're looking for by
subtracting or adding blue and yellow and green
and magenta and red and cyan because sometimes
our brains just don't work in those colors, but that is your option. I'll click Okay. For our non native art, the options are similar. You can see that
there's a color here, but it bears no relationship
at all to the color and the artwork and
changing the color has no effect on the artwork. There is no re-color
artwork dialogue accessible to us when we go
to edit and edit colors. We have re-color with
preset available, but there is nothing there
that we can actually choose. So basically, the non native
art is fixed in place. We can even do minor
color adjustments to it. The image can be
sort of changed, but the 3D object is the one that gives us
some flexibility. So if you want to be able
to change these objects, the color of them, don't expand them and leave
them as 3D objects instead so that you can get access to the re-color options
that you want. Or at least make sure that
you've selected the color you want to use before you
expand the object.
20. Tip 18 - Symbols on 3D shapes: Tip number 18 involves
adding elements to a 3D object using symbols. I have a 3D object here. It's just created using my
standard graphic style, which is this one that's
just an inflation. I'm going to create
some additional objects on going to the Rectangle tool. I'm just going to drag out a long thin rectangle and I'm going to change the color
of this to a very light, purply pink so that
we can see it. But it's not really, really obvious because it's going
on this shape in a minute. I'm going to Alt or Option
drag a duplicate away. And having done that, I'm going to continually press Control D. That's going to give me a whole series
of these objects, all nice and evenly spaced. I'm going to select over all of these and I'm going
to my symbols panel. I'm just going to click
to add them as a symbol. I'm just going to click Okay, it doesn't matter
what settings we use there and I'm just going to delete them from my document. So those stripes are now
available as a new symbol. Let's go now to
our 3D object and back to Window 3D and materials. And if we go to the
Materials panel, will notice that there is
an option for graphics. And if I go to graphics at the very bottom of the graphics, these are the symbols that default symbols in Illustrator, there is my new symbol. So if I click it, that symbol is then
applied to the shape. Now if you've done this
using the original, that classic 3D options
in Adobe Illustrator, you'll know that they
are a lot more robust. You can do more
interesting things with your actual symbols, but you can do some
things with this one. I'm just going to
show you that you can scale it here and
you can rotate it, but that's pretty much all
that you can do with it. And if we click on
Invisible geometry, you can see that this is
being wrapped around, but not all the way
around the shape. So if we were to expand it with Invisible geometry set on, we will get these bent shapes, but there's very little that we could actually do with them. In the classic 3D effects, you can do heaps and
heaps of things. So just be aware that
this is available, but it is somewhat limited.
21. Tip 19 - Groups of Objects and 3D: Tip number 19 involves
grouping objects and dealing with a group set of objects with the 3D tools. What I've got here is a couple of circles on top
of a couple of rectangles. These are two identical
sets of objects. This said I'm going to
grow up with Object and then Group this one. I'm not going to grow up, so I'm just going to
leave them as they are. I'm going to select over this combined group
set of objects. I'm going to apply
a 3D effect to it. So I'm going to object and
I'm going to inflate them. I have a certain depth here. We're using a 100% volume. I can inflate both sides. If I like, I can choose
a different rotation, such as off-axis front. I may want to bring the
depth back a little bit, but even if I bring
it back to 0, you'll see that there's still
a definite shadow here. These two objects are being treated separately and together, they're actually
interacting with each other in this 3D effect. So if I go to on lighting, we can change the lighting
for the entire object. Again, soften it and
just render it out. I think I would like to get
this to be a bit shinier, so let's just remove
the roughness there. Let's go and see if we can do something about the lighting, which was pretty horrible. So there is our
resulting object. We've got these two flat objects are two-dimensional objects, the circle and the square,
grouping them together. And this is how they
are been created as a 3D object and they're
interacting with each other. These two objects are not group
there just by themselves. And if we go to object, you'll see that we've
got practically nothing we can do with it. We can click on inflate, but we don't get any
inflation settings. We can change this
the x and y-axis, but we have very limited
things that we can do here. In materials. We do get access to materials, but we don't have the properties that
we're we're used to. So if I open up the
Properties panel down here, we can't adjust the shine. And in lighting
where we don't have any options are all in lighting. So the process of
applying the 3D effect to true objects that
are not grouped is very different to applying them to two objects
that are grouped, we get very different results. So just be aware of that if you want this sort
of interaction, just pop the objects that
you want to interact with each other inside a group.
22. Tip 20 - Color on Color 3d Effect: Tip number 20 involves getting a dimensional color
on color effect. I have a heart that I have created here and I'm going
to make a duplicate. I'm going to choose
Edit Copy and then Edit Paste in Place. I'm going to hold the Alt and the shift key that would be
Option and Shift on a Mac, I'm going to create a smaller heart inside
the larger one. And because I want
these two interact with each other as I
apply the 3D effect, I'm going to group them
because we learned in the last tip that that's the way that we get this
dimensional effect. I'm going to my 3D
tools with window and 3D and materials and
I'm going to inflate this. And you can see immediately
that things haven't worked out the way that I
expected them to work out. I don't have a
dimensional effect. I don't have the second heart
interacting with the first. And whatever I try, I'm not going to get
the result that I want. So why did it work before
when I had different colors, shapes, and it's not
working when I've got two shapes are
the same color. Well, it's the two shapes
that are the same color. That is the hint to why
this is not working. Let's open up our group and let's go to
the smaller heart. That's the one on the top. I've got a color
associated with it. I'm going to double-click
on this color, and I'm going to look at this
color here, the numbers. And I've got RGB values. What I'm gonna do is just change one of these values by one. So for example,
I'm going to take this blue value and
instead of 255, I'm going to make it to
54 and I'll click OK. Immediately. You'll see the result
by changing the color, even by just one number or
one of the three red, green, and blue channels we've created in quote marks,
a different color. And so we're getting the
3D dimensional effect. So at anytime that you want a sort of color on color effect, you can't do it with
the exact same color, but you can change your
color by just one number. You won't be able to
see the difference. It's so subtle that
you won't notice it, but it will allow you to get this effect that
you're looking for. So now I can go ahead
and work on my heart. I can change its rotation. I can add some lighting
effects and for example, add shadows to it. But we just need to make
sure that we're working with two colors that
are not the same. To get what it is
that we want from our heart or from our
3D effect, if you like.
23. Bonus Tip - 3D Text: For a bonus tip, Let's have a look
at 3D and texts. I've already
pre-prepared my text. It is live text, so it is fully editable. I'm using Myriad Pro bold, about a 100 points. I'm still on my very
small document. And if you're
working with texts, you really will want
to be working on small documents as
you're about to see. So let's go into the
3D materials panel. We've got options like plane, which is just going to
give us our text rotated. We can extrude it, which is possibly what you
will want to do with texts. So we can just
extruded and choose the depth that we want
to extrude it too. It's also possible to
inflate it and that sort of it's going hand in
hand with that Extrusion. We've still got our
extrusion depth here, but here the front of the letters is all
sort of bubbled out. I'm just going to choose
a plane extrusion here. Now I am working with off-axis front or I was
now I'm back there. Again. I'm going to choose
a bevel for this. So let's go and have a
look at our bevel options. I'm going to turn beveling on and then I can choose
the type of bevel. So I have classic here, but I could choose other
ones that I wanted to use. And you can adjust the
width of the bevel and have it more or less
and its height so it can stick out further or be more flush with the surface. If you choose Bevel inside, then it's going to
be indented rather than puffing out from the top. And there's also
a repeat option, so you can repeat your bevel. So you can have multiple
bevels on top of each other and you can adjust
the space between them. Obviously, if you have too many, you're going to run out
of space pretty quickly. I'm going to just do one repeat, but I am going to have
this sizable bevel here. I'm going to materials. So with text as you can
with any other shape, you can add materials to them. This is probably one
of the areas where this particular 3D tool is
better than the old 3D tools, because the materials tend to work better on their shapes. Just seems to grab hold of the shapes a little
bit more accurately. So I'm just going
back to my default, but just be aware that you have all your materials options here. I'm going to base properties
because I do want my text to be nice and glossy. Let's go to lighting and let's go and see what we can
do here with lighting. Well, this is top-left,
this a standard. You might even like
diffuse lighting for your texts and you
obviously have, right. I'm just looking for something
that is going to give me a fairly good contrast
between dark and light. And you can adjust the intensity and all the things that
we've been used to setting like this
because I'm saying this edge bevel here going to increase softness because
if I want to use a shadow, I want it to be fairly soft. Let's just add a shadow
here below the object. Let's increase
that shadow bombs. So we do get our shadow. All of a sudden, I
don't like that at all. So let's just turn the shadow. Let's now render our text and it rendered up pretty quickly. But if I zoom in, you'll see that this rendering
is really, really obvious. There's real pixelization here. So what I'm gonna
do is go back out. I'm going to change
my rendering. So for this, I'm
going to increase my raster settings all the
way up to 300 and click Okay, so that's going to be my
Document Raster Settings. I'm also increasing the
quality of my renders so it's set at high and I'm
going to click Render. Just be aware that depending
how many bevels you have and how complex
your object is, it may take longer for
your object to render. And I've actually had mine taking couple of minutes
to render earlier today. So just be aware of that. And same things close down applications that you don't
need while you're rendering. And make sure that
you render off a small enough starting
object so that you're not going to tie your machine up impossibly long or even
risk of crashing it. So there are some of the options you have for working with text here in the new 3D
tools in Illustrator.
24. Project and Course Wrap Up: We've now completed the video training
portion of this course, so it's over to you. Your project for this
class is to create one or more 3D objects using these new 3D tools in
Adobe Illustrator. Post an image of your
completed shapes as your class project. Now, I hope that you've enjoyed this course and that
you've learned lots about using these new 3D
tools in Adobe Illustrator. If you did enjoy the course. And when you see a prompt
that asks if you would recommend this class
to others, please. Would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes, that
you do recommend this class. And secondly, write even
in just a few words, why you enjoyed the class. Your recommendations will
help other students to say that this is a course
that they might like to take. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a
question, please do. I read all your comments
and questions and I look at and review all
your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much
for joining me for this episode of graphic
design for lunch. I'll look forward
to seeing you in another class here
on Skillshare soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
