3D Extrusion Effects with Text & Shapes in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Intro to 3d Extrusion in Adobe Illustrator: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, 3D extrusion effect in Adobe Illustrator. Today we're looking at creating 3D extruded objects in Illustrator. We're going to start by creating the series of objects that we're going to extrude, and then we're going to use the 3D panel in Illustrator to do the extrusions. I'm going to show you two very different results that you can achieve with just a simple change in how you prepare the objects for 3D extrusion. Now as you're working through these videos, you might see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying this class, give it a thumbs up. This helps others to identify this as a class that they might want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read all of your comments and I look at all of your class projects. Now let's get started on 3D extruded shapes in Illustrator. 2. Before we begin - Find the Right Tools to Use: Before we begin this class, I just want to address some changes that have happened in Adobe Illustrator since this class was produced. In April 2022, Adobe added some new 3D tools to Adobe Illustrator. And these work very differently to the old tools. And the two can fit side-by-side because they are so different in terms of their effect. For this class, you're going to need to use what are now called the classic 3D tools. You can't use the new ones because they just don't work in the same way. And they're also really, really slow in terms of requiring a lot of machine overhead. So you really want to be making sure that you're using the correct 3D tools. I'm just going to select this shape and show you what's different. If you go to Window and 3D, which is what I would have told you in the rest of this class. You're going to get the new tools and these are not what you want. So don't do that when you see me do that in the class, just know that the position of the 3D tools that you need have moved. Instead you're going to select your object and you go to Effect and then 3D and materials. Because here are your 3D classic tools. And depending on whether in the class we use Extrude and Bevel, revolve or rotate. You're just going to select one of these three options. The options are exactly the same as they used to be, and they work exactly the same as they used to work. So it's important that you understand that there are some new tools. They're not the ones you want. You want the old tools which are now called classic. From there, you should be able to just continue on with the class exactly as I have taught it. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask in the question area and I'll help you as soon as I'm able to. 3. 3D Extrusion Effects - Part 1 - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class: Before we get started with this effect, I just want to show you where I got the inspiration from. This is a site called FontFont.com. One of the things that they do is that they sell what are called layered fonts. Now, this is an example of a layered font. Layered fonts are a little bit on the expensive side, particularly for playing around in Illustrator, but I found a couple of free ones, so I'm going to create a video on those later on. But for now we're just looking at the effect that you can get with the elements in this case from a specific layered font. What I wanted to do was to reproduce something like this in Illustrator using the 3-D Tools, and along the way while I was playing with the effect, I found a different effect. We're actually going to create two effects in this video, both inspired by this particular layered font. I just wanted to show you where the inspiration came from. Now the effect that we're creating uses 3-D Tools in Illustrator. I've tested this out with Illustrator CS 5.5, and it works in that. So even if you're working with an older version of Illustrator, you should be fine. Of course, the same tools are available in Illustrator CC, so it's forward from 5.5 you should be fine. Let's get started on our effect. We're going to start in Illustrator, so I'll choose File, New. I'm going to make a document that's 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels in size, RGB color mode. Yours can be any size that you like. I'm going to start out with the Ellipse Tool, I'm going to drag holding the Shift key to create a circle. If I need to move this while I'm still drawing it, just hold the space bar and you can move the shape while you're still drawing it, as long as the spacebar is held down. Let go the space bar and you can go back to drawing the object itself. Now I want to give this no stroke at all and I want a fill, and I'm going to use a color here from Creative Cloud Libraries that I've already downloaded. If you're not using a Creative Cloud application, you'll just go and select a color from your color swatch just as normal. But if you are using the Adobe Creative Cloud products, be aware that you can go to Adobe Color online and download color themes that you can then have accessible inside illustrator. I'm using one of those today. Next, we're going to create a line. I'm going to select the line segment tool. I'm going to click in the middle of this shape to center it in the middle of the circle and hold Shift as I draw it, because that will take it out at a 45 degree angle. I'm going to widen this stroke, I want it to be quite wide, in fact I want it to be about 80 points wide. I'm going to click in the stroke size panel here and just press Shift and up arrow because that will increase it 10 points at a time. I want the end of this shape to be rounded, so I'll go to the Stroke panel here and click on caps, and it's this round cap that I want that gives the line a round cap. I'm also going to color this line the same color as I used for the circle. I'm going back to my library, I'm going to re-select the color that I was using. I'm going to draw two other smaller lines back to the line segment tool, click in the middle to make sure it's nicely lined up, or at least fairly close to being lined up, doesn't have to be perfect. This time I'm just going to drag out, I'm not going to bother doing the shift key because I don't want this to be at a 45-degree angle. I do want it to be a lot less wide though, so I'm just going to make it 40 pixels wide. Now I'm going to click here and create a second line, and it's going to have the same stroke effect as this one here. I think it could be a little bit longer, so I'm just going to undo it with Control or Command Z, and just make it a bit longer. The next shape is going to be a circle, so I'm going back to the Ellipse tool. I'm going to Alt+Shift drag to create my second circle. It's going to be inside the first. I'm going to color it a different color, so I have the stroke selected right now. I'm going to make this stroke my fill. I'm going back to select another color from this color palette. Now, if you're not 100 percent sure that your circle is over the top of the other circle, let see how we would make sure that they're centered nicely. We're going to select just the two circles, not the lines, just the two circles, and then having selected over them, we're going to click again on this outside circle so it gets darker blue line around it. That's telling us that if we now go and click, the center options, horizontal aligned center, and vertical aligned center, that the shape of the pink shape will be aligned centrally over the blue shape. The blue shape is going to be the reference point. That was important for us because we've gone to the trouble of creating these lines centered on the blue shapes, so I want to make sure that we don't shift the blue shape and lose the alignment of these lines. The pink shape needs a couple of lines too. I'm going to click in the middle and just drag this out. Now, in the original drawing, the lines that were attached to the middle shape weren't over the edge of the blue shape. But in this instance, I want them to be. I'm going to show you in a minute why when we go to the 3-D tools. I'm just going to make this pink and again make the cap around, I'm going to add a second line to this shape as well. Doesn't matter where your lines go, it's just for some visual interest. In the next video, we'll go ahead and join these shapes together. 4. 3D Extrusion Effects - Part 2: Next up I want to create one blue shape and one pink shape. I want to join the various elements together going into my last panel here. Let's just open up the last panel. Now to see things a little more clearly, I'm going to open the flyout here. Go to Panel Options. I'm going to Panel Options and I'm going to select "Other" and I'm going to make my size 40 pixels. That's going to make each of these layers just a little bit easier to see. Now these two lines here, I want to expand. I'm going to choose Object Expand. I just want to expand, the stroke. I'll click "Okay". Now I'm going to ungroup these Object, Ungroup. I need to make sure that I'm just working with plain old objects here. Now that I've done that, I'm going to select all three shapes. I'm just Shift clicking on the circle. I have this line which is no longer a line but rather a filled shape and this one and the pink. I'm going to the Pathfinder and I'm going to click "Unite". That makes a single shape here in the last palette you can say this shape from the three individual shapes. Let's go down to this object and let's Shift click on all these lines and we want to expand those too. You can't successfully unite these objects together while they remain lines, they have to be expanded before you can do that. Let's go to expand. We only want the stroke, so I'll click "Okay". I'm going to ungroup them, Object, Ungroup, so I don't have a mess of objects here. I've got three paths. One for each of these lines. I'm going to Shift click on this icon here to select the big circle. Now I've got all the blue objects selected. I'm going to the Pathfinder and I'll click "Unite". Here you can see in the last pallet, I have one shape for this blue object at the back. Next up we need something in the middle here. I'm going to put a number, so I'm going to the text tool, just going to click in here, and I'm going to type the number 8. I'm going to select it. I'm going to make it much bigger than it is. To do this, I'm going to click in the font size box and press Shift up arrow because that makes it bigger more quickly. I'm going to move it roughly into position. Then look at the font that I've used. I've used Myriad Pro, but I think we can do better than that. I'm going to Myriad Pro, I'm going to open up the Myriad Pro options here. I want to use Bold SemiExtended because that to bigger and fatter character. It's going to look a little bit better in the final object. Again, I need to color it. I have the fill color selected here. Let's go to the color themes and lets see if we can pick out a color here from the color scheme that we were using. Well, let's try that. Now I have three shapes and we're ready to convert this to a 3D object. 5. Illustrator for Lunch Text Effect Part 3: To convert this to a 3D object, I'm going to select either all of these shapes with the selection tool. Now the effect that we're going to create here is going to be achievable even with older versions of Illustrator. I've already tested it for you in Illustrator 5.5. It's going to work with practically every version that any of you have reported to me that you're using. With the object selected, we're going to the Effect menu here and we're choosing 3D Extrude and Bevel. It's Effect 3D Extrude and Bevel. If you're working with an earlier version of Illustrator, your dialogue may not look 100 percent like this, but everything is here. More options and the "Okay" and "Cancel" keys and "Map Art" are actually up here in the dialogue not down the bottom. But really, that's pretty much the only difference. I've checked and everything we're using is going to be there for you. Now I've just click the Preview and I'm using off-axis front here. That's the setting that we're going to be using. You can say that each of these objects is now extruded, so it's got a depth. We can alter the depth here by just increasing the extruded depth. You don't want to do it too much, but you might want to increase it just a little bit to get some interesting depth in your object. If we go to more options, we'll be able to see options that we have for working with this object. One of them is to adjust the light. We have a little light source in here and it's providing light to our object, so we could move it perhaps a little bit more over the eight. Ambient light is light that is over all of these objects. If we adjust the ambient light, it's going to be the same even if we add further lights later on. So this is a global light setting, if you like. If you're seeing rough edges here, you can increase the blending steps because sometimes Illustrator finds it a little bit difficult to create a smooth blend from one dark color to a lighter color. You can always increase your blend steps. You don't want to increase it if you don't need to because that's just going to make it a little bit more time consuming to render the object later on. In this lighting box here, this is turning this light on and off, this option here and this one's for new light so we can actually add a second light. We can drag that to a different position and you can see here that we're lighting this side of the object but the intensity is too high. The light intensity setting is one that's only applied to the currently selected light. So I can light this side of the object a little bit with this light. I'm just going to drag it into position. I'm adding a little bit of highlight here but this light here, you can see its intensity is still at 100 percent. Light intensity is light-specific, whereas ambient light is global light. If you're happy with what you've got here, you can just click "Okay". Now you may notice that these shapes have moved a little bit, they haven't actually moved, it's just that in creating the extrusion, we've lost the centering of these shapes. Let's just go back to the last panel, I'm going do a couple of things while I'm here. One of them is, I want to make a copy of this entire layer. So I'm just going to drag and drop that onto the New Layer icon. I've got two exactly the same objects on top of each other. I'm going to lock the bottom one and turn it off because I want to come back to that in a minute. Let's just open this one up. Well, you can see that these shapes have maintained their individual shape status so I can select on the number eight and I can move it. I'm just going to move it over a little bit. I can select the pink circle and I can move it. Now I'm going to have to eyeball this to get it in approximately the right place, it's not an exact science here but I can do something that is going to look reasonably good. Let's just go and get our eight in position. There is one 3D rendered object very similar to the LED type effect that we were looking at earlier. But let's turn that off for a minute. I'm just going to turn off its icon, I'm going to collapse the layer up here, I'm going to lock it, and I'm going back to the one that I had not fixed. I'm going to open up this layer, I'm going to view the individual objects and when I click on, for example, the number eight and open up the appearance panel, you'll see that it has a 3D Extrude and Bevel attached to it. I'm going to pick up that layer and drag it onto the trash can. I'm going to remove the 3D effect from that particular shape and I'm going to go and do it for the other two shapes as well because I want to get rid of this 3D Extrude and Bevel from each of these objects. I'll show you why in just a second. Now that we've done that, let's go back to the last panel. I'm going to select these three objects and I'm going to group these objects. I'm going to choose Object Group. Now when we create a 3D extrusion from these objects, something different and really fascinating is going to happen. Let's go to Effect 3D Extrude and Bevel. We'll go back to our off-axis front and we're going to click here on "Preview". Now you can say something interesting has happened over here. We've got a flat object, so the three objects have been grouped together and they've been treated as a single object for the purpose of the extrusion. We've got this pink paste actually cutting through the blue shape underneath. Let's just rotate it a little bit so that we can see the other side of it. I'm just going to spin this around here because I want to see this edge of the shape and you can see that it's being cut out, the pink shape is actually being cut through the green shape. Just a very interesting effect here. Going back to my off-axis front, and I'm going to add some light sources and a slightly bigger extrusion depth. The extrusion depth is the depth of this object and obviously 230 was a gross overestimate so let's just take it down probably to about 130. I can add lights using this more options, click on "More Options" and add another light source. I'm going to add another light source over here. I just don't want it to be so intense. I'm going to increase my blend steps to make sure that I can see a smooth transition here and not individual steps, 100 should do it. Now, while we've got this shape, there's something else interesting that we can do. I'm going here to the bevel options and I'm going to choose classic. When I choose classic, this is what happens, is that each of these shapes is now being recognized as a shape that can be beveled so we've got little bevels here where the shapes intersect. You can change the height of your bevel, at the moment it's four points, and I'm just going to bring mine down to about two points, maybe three. This is another 3D effect that we can create and the difference between this and the one before was simply grouping the objects before we created the 3D effect. I'll click "Okay". Now this 3D effect has been applied to this grouped object. If I open up the group object, anything that I put in this group will be part of the 3D effect. Let's go and see what we can do. I'm going to select my group, I'm going to the appearance panel, I'm going to turn off my 3D Extrude and Bevel just temporarily. I can do that by just clicking on the eyeball icon here. Let's go and add another circle to this shape and I'm going to add it up in here. I'm just going to drag out a circle and place it roughly in this position here. I'm going to color it the same green as this back object. Effectively, when I click away from this object, we can't even see the circle that we've got here because it's the same color as the back object. Let's open up the last panel. This didn't go inside the group, it's here, this is the group here so I'm just going to drag it down and drop it inside the group. Now let's go back to the group, click on its eyeball icon, click on the appearance panel, and go and re-select the 3D Extrude and Bevel. Illustrator adds the Extrude and Bevel effect to the circle that we created. Even though it's the same color as the background object, it's showing a bevel effect because it's part of the group that has the 3D effect applied to it. We're getting a really interesting 3D effect here. Your project for this class will be to create a layered 3D object like this. You can do it exactly as I have done, follow my design, or you can make a design of your own choice. You can use either of the two 3D options that I've shown you, either grouping all the objects together and then rendering those as a 3D extrusion or doing it to the individual objects in their ungrouped form. You may want to experiment with both effects and go ahead then and post images of both your final results. I hope that you've enjoyed this course and that you've learned something about 3D extrusions in Illustrator. If you did enjoy this course and if you see a prompt to recommend this class to others, please give it a thumbs up. This helps others to identify this as a class that they may want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read all of your comments and I look at all of your class projects. I'm Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, 3D extrusions. I'll look forward to seeing you in another episode of Graphic Design for Lunch soon. 6. Color Your Extruded Shapes: This is a short additional video for the 3D extrusion because one of my students was running into a bit of problem trying to create an extrusion with an object that had a gradient with it and actually making the gradient work around the edge. We're going to look at that right now. Now I've already applied a gradient to this gear shape, but what I need is a rectangle that is also filled with the gradient. I'm just selecting a small rectangle here and have the gradient applied to it. But I'm going to make this a linear. I'm just going to go here to my gradient that I created and just make it linear. It's just going to be a small shape. Now I'm going to open up my symbols panel here and you can get to that buy choosing window and then symbols. With the selection tool, I'm just going to drag and drop this rectangle into the symbols palette. All I'm going to do is just click "Okay." I don't have to do anything else. I don't want this symbol so I can press delete to remove it from the document, and it's going to close that down. Now with the shapes selected, I'm going to choose effect and then 3D and extrude and bevel. At this point I can now create my extrusion. I'm going to give it a fairly deep extrusion just so that we can see what's going on. You can just select whatever options you want here, I've got a customer rotation, but I started with the off-axis front. Right now you can say that there is no gradient being applied to the extruded shape. Well, we can do that now. I'm going to click here on map art. Now with saying the individual facets of this shape, there are 51 for this shape. Right now we're seeing this shape which is the front of our gear. We don't want to change that because it's already got its gradient. But I'm going to click to move forward. Now you can see that this is sum inside portion of the gear. We don't want to do that either. It's going to move across until highlighted is something that we're actually interested in effecting. Going to be a lot of shapes here that you aren't interested in affecting but he was one I was interested in this one in here. What I'm going to do once I have it selected, is I'm going to click here on the symbol palette. I'm going to my new symbol. You can see here that this is now colored with my symbol color. Now my symbol is much bigger than the area have to cover. I can actually move it around to get the right color in the right spot for this shape. If I want it to be more orange, then I can do that. Now I'm going forward to the next pace and that's not something I'm seeing here in this particular extrusion, so I don't have to change it. This is something I can see. So I'm going to go and click on new symbol, move it into position. Well actually hits are behind shapes, so I don't actually need that so I can just continue on. Its actually not affecting the shape. So this is probably the one that is affecting that area. Yes, it is. It's going to move a piece of the gradient here into position. Now if I wanted to, I could rotate my gradients. I can get all effects here with a gradient on the panels or the facets of this gear shape. I just need to go around and work out which ones I'm actually able to see. Then I can apply this symbol based coloring to that facet of the gear. This is this panel here. You would just go all the way around isolating all the facets that you are actually able to see and when you're finished, just click "Okay" and then "Okay" again. Then you have your extruded shape with gradients on the individual panels. Now if you just want a solid color, can do that as well. You just drag out a small square or rectangle and fill it with a solid color that you want to use. So I'm just going to make it orange color, or orange that came originally from this gradient. Again, just go and created in the symbols pallet. So you're going to have to drag and drop it into the symbols palette. Click "Okay". Re-select your 3D shape. Now you're going into the appearance panel with it selected new. Just want to click on this 3D extruded bevel mapped effect inside the appearance panel, because you don't want to add a new one you want to bee able to edit the one you've already got applied two the gear. You'll go back to my bar to go and found the surfaces that you want to work with. I'm just going to find a surface here that we can work with this one hear. Then you'll just apply, in this case, just the solid color to it. You can go around and apply the solid color to every one of the facets that's going to be visible in your 3D extruded shape. Click "Okay" and then "Okay" again. Then it has these colors applied to it, solid colors in this instance, but you could also use a gradient should you wish to do so. I hope that helps you seen how you can actually apply different colors to extruded shapes in illustrator.