From the course: Illustrator 2020 One-on-One: Fundamentals

Absolute versus relative rounding - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator 2020 One-on-One: Fundamentals

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Absolute versus relative rounding

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- [Instructor] In this movie, I'll show you the difference between absolute and relative rounding. So for starters here, I'll go ahead and click inside the star in order to select it with my white arrow tool. And then, I'll double click on any one of these round corner widgets to bring up the corners dialogue box. And notice, in addition to these various corner options, including round, and inverted round, and chamfer, we also have these two founding icons down here. Now they're not going to produce any effect with chamfer, so I'll go ahead and switch back to inverted round, which I had applied before, and now notice by default, rounding is set to absolute, meaning that we're getting the same degree of rounding on each and every one of these bumps and essentially what Illustrator is doing is drawing a perfect quarter circle at every one of these locations. But, if I switch over to relative, then in the case of this star, I'm going to make some of these corners sharper as we're seeing here. So the corners down at the bottom, they're remaining more or less quarter ellipses, but as we move upward to what are basically more acute corners, we are seeing harsher lumps. So once again, this is what we see with absolute rounding and this is what we see with relative rounding. Now, in my case, we are seeing sharper lumps, just as in the case of the appearance of the icon, but that's not always the way things reconcile. To give you a sense for what's really going on, I'll go ahead and click OK to accept that change, and now, I'm going to turn my guides layer back on so I can see those center guides and I'm going to create a kind of custom ellipse using the rectangle tool. So I'll start by selecting rectangle tool from the shape tool fly out menu, and then I'll position my cursor at the intersection of the two guidelines and I will Alt or Option click to bring up the rectangle dialogue box and I'm looking for a square that has width and height values of 100 points each, at which point, I'll go ahead and click OK to create that rectangle like so. All right now I want to rotate it so it's more of a diamond. And so, I'll click on the word transform up here in the control panel, I'll make sure the center reference point is selected, and I'll go ahead and change that rotate value to 45 degrees and I'll press the tab key in order to rotate that square. All right, now I want to make it wider and so, I'm going to turn off the link icon, you want to make sure that you have a broken chain, and then, click on the W to select the width value and change it to 300 points in order to produce this effect here. All right, now I'll go ahead and press the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac, to accept that change. And if you're working along with me, you'll see shape expanded appear for just a moment up here at the top of the screen and that's because you no longer have a so called smart rectangle. That doesn't really matter because we still have all these corner points to work with. All right, now I'm going to press the A key to switch to the white arrow tool, as we're seeing here, and I'm going to turn off a couple of points here by Shift clicking on the top and bottom points, so that only the left and right points are selected. And now, I'm going to change my corners value, up here in the control panel, to 24 points because I want some pretty exacting results here and then I'll press the Enter key, or the Return key on a Mac, to accept that change. So now we have what amounts to an acute corner over here on the left and right sides. And yet Illustrator is still tracing them with perfect quarter circles. All right now, I'll click on the top point to select it and Shift click on the bottom point to select it as well, and then, I will drag upward on this lower widget as far as I can until I go way past the top edge as you're seeing here. Notice the other widget moved way below the bottom edge and I end up with this maximum corners value of 243.78 points, and that's going to vary depending on the size of the shape, but if you're doing exactly what I'm doing, you'll get that result as well, and we end up with this kind of modified ellipse. Now you may wonder well, why would you do that? Why would you ever go through these steps when you have the ellipse tool, which gives you, let's be honest, better looking results and the reason is because we can customize our experience using round corners. All right now, I'll Alt click or Option click on the outline of this shape to select the entire thing, and then I'll double click on any one of these round corner widgets to revisit the corners dialogue box. And now notice you can still switch your corner type to, for example, inverted round, which produces this interesting effect, and if you switch to chamfer, you're going to restore a rectangle. So again, you can customize this experience as much as you want. I'm going to switch back to round and now I'm going to switch from absolute, which is trying to draw those perfect arcs, to relative, and if you look closely, I'll do that again, this is the appearance of absolute rounding and this is the appearance of relative rounding and notice, when I switch to relative, the acute corners become sharper, they become bigger lumps, and the less acute corners, these big corners right here, they flatten out, and as a result, we get a smoother shape. At which point, I'll go ahead and click OK in order to accept that change. All right now, just for the sake of getting something done here, let's turn this shape into an eye by pressing Control C, or Command C on a Mac, in order to copy the shape to the clipboard, now I'll go ahead and Shift click inside the custom starburst to select it as well and then I'll go up to the object menu, choose compound path and choose make, and that moves the shape in front of the text, so I'll right click somewhere inside the document window, choose a range and choose send to back in order to send that shape in back of the text. And then, to paste that shape that I just copied into the background, you want to go up to the edit menu and choose paste in back, or you have that keyboard shortcut of Control B, or Command B on a Mac. And it looks like we just filled in the path, but that's because it's filled with the same color as the starburst, which will become evident as soon as we rotate it by clicking on the word transform over here on the right side of the control panel, make sure that center reference point is once again selected and change the rotate value to 90 degrees and the press the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac, to apply that change. All right, now I think the iris should be purple, so I'm going to click on the first color swatch and change it to this shade of purple right there, the one that begins with R equals 147. All right now I want to create the pupil by clicking on the word transform once again and this time, I want the link to be on so I'm going to go ahead and click on this chain icon so that the width and height values are linked together and now I'll click on the width value and change it to 70%, so you want to enter the percent value and then, because I want to make a copy of the shape, I'll press Alt Enter, or Option Return on the Mac. All right, now we want this shape to be black so I'll go ahead and click on the first color swatch and change it to black like so. All right, now we need to create a little highlight, so I'll click on the word transform once again, click on the W in order to select the width value, change it to 33 percent and then press Alt Enter, or Option Return on the Mac, to create a smaller copy of that shape. Let's change its fill to white and then I'm going to press Shift up arrow three times and Shift left arrow once in order to move the highlight into the position you see it now. And now I'll go ahead and click off the shape to deselect it and I'll turn off the guides layer so that we can take in the final version of this awkward art. And that is how you switch between absolute and relative rounding here inside Illustrator.

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