Applying and expanding a dynamic effect

- [Instructor] All right, our first project is going to be to create this cube of cubes. And, in case you saw me do this back in Deke's Techniques 241 and 242, which came out in the year 2013, you should know that I've updated the technique and I've streamlined it to make it easier to pull off. Now, we're going to start things off by creating this first orthogonal cube right here in the center, and I think this is a kind of skill that every Illustrator user should have, because it doesn't actually rely on skewing or slanting or anything like that. Rather, you're best off drawing it using the plain old line tool. And so I'm going to be creating this effect from scratch by going up to the File menu and choosing New From Template, or you can press Control + Shift + N, or Command + Shift + N on the Mac. And then, I'll locate that Center Guides document and double-click on it in order to create a new file. And I'm going to start off by renaming this drawing layer Primitive, because this will be our first primitive side. All right, now you want to select a line segment tool, which you can get from the Line Tool flyout menu. And then, we want to click at the intersection of these two guidelines, but, in order to pull that off effectively, I need for my smart guides to be turned on. So, I'll go to the View menu and choose Smart Guides, and then I'll click right there at the intersection of those two guides to bring up this dialogue box, and I'll change the length value to 60 points, and I want the angle to be straight down, which is negative 90 degrees, but you can't enter negative 90 into this dialogue box, so instead I'll enter 360 minus 90, which gives me 270 degrees, and I'll click Okay. All right, I'm zoomed out a little bit too far here, so, I'm going to zoom in a little bit. And then, I'll go up to the Effect menu, choose Distort and Transform, and choose the Transform command in order to bring up the big Transform Effect dialogue box. And, I want to rotate this guy 360 degrees divided by three, because there's going to be a total of three sides. And that gives me 120 degrees, but if I turn on the preview check box, you can see that it's rotating from the wrong point. And so to fix things, go ahead and click on the top left point in that little reference point matrix right there, and you'll end up rotating this guy like so. Then, click inside the Copies field, and press the up arrow key to create one and only one copy. Then, click Okay. All right, now we want to create the opposite edges of this first side, and to do that, go up to the Effect menu and choose the second instance of Transform, the one that ends in dot-dot-dot. And what that's going to do is bring up the dialogue box complete with our last settings, but before that happens, Illustrator's probably going to ask you if you really want to assign another instance of the same effect, and the answer is, yes you do. So go ahead and click on the Apply New Effect button, and then, return the rotate value to zero, and go ahead and turn on the Reflect X and Reflect Y check boxes, both of those guys, and then turn on the preview check box. And you'll get, more or less, the side you're looking for, but they're in totally the wrong location. To get them more or less in the right place, go ahead and click in the center of the reference point matrix. And I say more or less because you can see that things are off right here. Notice how these guys don't quite line up with each other? And that's because the Transform effect is always basing its result off of the appearance of the selected objects. And, in this case, the thickness of the strokes are throwing things off. And so you could scooch things around using the move options here, but you'd have to do some rather intense math in order to get the right results. So, the best thing to do is just click okay, and accept the fact that things aren't quite as they should be, and then, go over here to the layers panel, click on the flyout menu icon, and choose Duplicate Primitive in order to make a copy of it. And then, turn the original off, and go ahead and double-click in an empty portion of this new layer. And let's name this guy Cubes, plural, because eventually we'll have multiple cubes, and then change the color to gold, let's say. And then click Okay. All right, now we need to get the stroke out of the equation and you do that by clicking on the stroke swatch right there and setting it to None. Now that goes ahead and gets rid of our problems, but it also gets rid of the effect, as you can see, because Illustrator doesn't really have anything to hang the effect on at this point. And so, what we need to do is give this thing a fill, which doesn't really make any sense, because, after all, it's a single segment open path. But, go ahead and do it by clicking in that first swatch on the left side of the control panel, and let's just go ahead and set it to black. It won't look any different than it did before, but you can see it here inside the thumbnail in the Layers panel, so it must be there. And now, to render out that side, go up to the Object menu and choose this command right here, Expand Appearance. And you should know that Expand is Illustrator's term for basically taking something dynamic and making it static. And so, I'll go ahead and choose Expand Appearance and you can see that we now have four segments just as we need, after which point we need to join them together, because they're currently four independent segments, by going up to the Object menu, choosing Path, and choosing Join. Or, of course, you can just press that ages-old keyboard shortcut of Control + J here on a PC, or Command + J on a Mac. And that goes ahead and gives us a filled shape. And if you want to confirm that everything's showing the way it should be, then just press the A key to switch to the white arrow tool, and click on any old anchor point and just drag it around, and you'll see that the points are fused together, just as they ought to be. All right, so I'll just go ahead and press Control + Z, or Command + Z on a Mac a couple of times in order to restore that filled shape. And that is how you create the first side in what will be an orthogonal cube by applying and then expanding a dynamic transform effect here inside Illustrator.