Introducing the automated Pattern Editor

- [Instructor] Okay, so here's my rendition of, I think, the eye of HAL 9000, the robot run amok from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Which you may recall is a Stanley Kubrik movie first released in 1968. Now granted, 2001 is in the past now and 1968 happened before some of you were born but the design still holds up today. So we're going to take this eye and turn it into this strangely eye-catching pattern. And the great thing is even though you can see the seams between the lenses, you can't see the tiles.

So for example, you might not be able to really tell that these tiles are arranged as rectangular bricks and these are hexagonal. Let's take a look at Illustrator's automated pattern editor also known as the pattern editing mode. I'll switch back to my starter file. And you want to start things off by selecting the objects that you want to turn into a pattern. And in our case, the backdrop is locked, so you can just press control-A, or command-A on a mac, to select everything on the drawing layer.

And then go onto the object menu, choose Pattern, and choose Make. Or, if you loaded my D keys keyboard shortcuts, you can press control-M, or command-M on the mac. And that will take you to the pattern editor. Now if this is the first time you've done this, you're going to see an alert message that tells you that Illustrator has already added a new swatch to the swatches panel. And any changes you make in the pattern editing mode will be saved when you exit. You can safely go ahead and turn on the Don't Show Again check box for this one and then click OK.

All right, I'm going to back up a little so that we can see more of the tiles at a time. And notice by default that I'm seeing the tile edge which is represented in the case of this circle as a square. Now I want to go ahead and bring these tiles closer together so I'm going to change my width and height values to, let's say, 250 a piece should work out pretty nicely. And that'll make those eyes overlap as we're seeing right here. Another way to work is to turn on this check box, Size Tile to Art. And as soon as you do, notice that you're going to lose the width and height values and you're going to bring up these H and V Spacing controls.

The difference between them is that width and height are absolute values, whereas the Spacing values are relative. And so, for example, I could enter positive values to move the tiles away or I could enter negative values in order to bring them together. But in the case of this artwork, I think things are going to fare better if I turn the check box off and I just go ahead and modify the width and height values. Now you should know that you can nudge these values if you like. So for example, if I press the down arrow key I'm going to move these tiles closer together, like so.

Or you can press shift-down arrow in order to move them closer together still. So notice when I'm pressing shift-down arrow that I am reducing the width value in this case in increments of 10 points instead of just one point. And I'm going to do the same for the height value. I'll go ahead and press shift-down arrow for it in order to scoot those tiles together so, again, they overlap. Now how they overlap is determined by these options right here. So currently, the way things stand, the lenses are appearing to the right and down below each of the lenses above them.

If you want to put the right ones in front, then you go ahead and select this option here. And notice how this moves this guy in front of this one here. You can also put the bottom lenses in front by selecting this icon, which is the effect I'm looking for by the way. But I also want the left ones to be in front in order to produce this effect here. Now notice this Copies option. Now that's just going to control how many copies you're seeing here inside the pattern editor. If you want to see more, then you can boost up the number of values, like so.

And that'll go ahead and fill up my entire screen. Or you can go with fewer if you prefer. And you can even take it all the way down to one. Although in most cases I doubt that's going to do you any good. Anyway, I'm going to crank this guy up to 7 x 7. Then we've got this Dim Copies to check box right there. Notice that it's set to 70%. You can take it to a lower value if you want and you can even enter a specific numerical value if you prefer. Or you can just go ahead and turn the check box off if you don't want to see any dimming whatsoever.

All right. Now the last thing we want to do is name this pattern. And so I'll just go ahead and click on the word Name right there. And I'll enter HAL, H-A-L, like so. And then I'll press the enter key, the return key on the mac to accept that change. All right, now we have a few ways to escape out up here. One is to cancel, and if you click that button then you are going to cancel the entire operation and you're going to lose that swatch here inside the swatches panel. Or, if you want to save your changes, you click the done button. But there's also a couple of other options.

You can click this left pointing arrow head in order to escape the pattern editing mode which will go ahead and save your changes, by the way, which is why your other option is to just press the escape key. So there is no keyboard shortcut for the cancel button, by the way. If you press the escape key, then you will go ahead and escape out of the mode and save your new pattern swatch as we're seeing here inside the swatches panel. All right, now I want to see what this pattern looks like. So I'll just go ahead and drop down to the little page icon at the bottom of the layers panel and alt or option click on it in order to force the display of the layer options dialog box.

If you loaded D keys, you also have the option of pressing control-shift-alt-L or command-shift-option-L on the mac. And I'll just go ahead and call this layer "pattern" and for no reason whatsoever I'll change the color to violet and then click OK. All right, now I want to draw a big rectangle to hold my pattern. So I'll go up to the View menu and choose Smart Guides in order to turn them on. And then I'll grab my rectangle tool, which you can get by pressing the M key, and I'll position my cursor at the corner of this red bounding box.

And I'll drag from one corner to the other, like so. Now I'm not looking for a stroke, so I'll go up to this second swatch right here and change it to none. And then I'll click on the first swatch and I'll select HAL. And we'll end up with this effect here. Now I've gone ahead and made the pattern, on purpose, a little too big. If you want to scale it, all you have to do is drop down to the scale tool, double click on it in order to bring up the scale dialog box, and I'm going to change the uniform value to 50% and turn on the Preview check box.

And notice, that not only scales the pattern, but it scales the rectangle as well. If all you want to do is scale the pattern, then go ahead and turn off the Transform Objects check box. Leave Transform Patterns turned on. And then go ahead and click OK. All right, now I'll just press the B key to switch back to my black arrow tool. I'll click off the rectangle to deselect it. And I'll go ahead and zoom in. And that is how you create a very basic repeating pattern using the automated pattern editor here inside Illustrator.