From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

701 Making one object blend slice across another

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

701 Making one object blend slice across another

- [Instructor] All right, so in a previous movie I showed you how to make one object blend cut through another. In this movie I'll show you how to make one blend cut across another. So in other words, instead of blasting through the back of the accordion extrusion, we'll be going through its side. And what that means is we need to bust up the blend associated with the U once again. So the first thing I'm going to do is extend this orange Z right here by clicking anywhere on it using the black arrow tool. And then I'll press the a key to switch the the white arrow tool and I'll click on the first point in the spine right here, which is the path of the blend. And then I'll just go ahead and drag this control handle upward like so. And you have to be very careful, by the way, in order to select that control handle. Because it's very easy to select some other portion of the blend instead. All right, so I'll just take it up to about this position here. It should work out nicely. And that'll raise this edge. And then I'll go ahead and select this point at the end of the spine and I'll drag it over to this position inside of the U. And that's going to actually extend the blend as we're seeing here. And then I'll drag this control handle upward, and again I want to be very careful because if I'm not careful, I'll just show you, if you're just slightly off then you'll end up doing one of these. And then you'll have to go back and click on that first anchor point again in order to light it up so that you can see the control handle and then try dragging that control handle again upward to right about here should work out pretty nicely. And I actually came up with some coordinates for this anchor point. So notice up here in the control panel we can see the x and y coordinates. And by the way, if you're not seeing your control panel up there at the top of the screen, you can go to the window menu and choose the control command. But in any event I'm going to set that x value to 276 exactly, and then I'll set the y value to 333 points like so, and that'll give me the coordinates that I'm looking for. Next I'll click out here in a larger portion of this yellow z. So you want to select this z independently of the rest of the blend. Then go ahead and select the rotate tool, which you can get by pressing the r key. And press the enter key, or the return key on a Mac, to bring up the rotate dialog box. Turn on the preview checkbox, and then I'm just going to take that angle value upwards just by nudging it by pressing the up arrow key on the keyboard to 6 degrees. And then I'll click OK. All right, now we need to get to work on the U, and this is going to take a fair amount of labor, and it can be a little bit confusing if you're seeing all these other blends on screen. And so what I'm going to do is press the v key to switch back to my black arrow tool, and then I'll click on the U right there in order to select that entire blend. And I'll go up to the select menu and choose inverse in order to select everything else in the illustration. And then I'll go to the object menu, choose hide and choose selection, or you can take advantage of that extremely old keyboard shortcut, believe it or not, of control 3 here on the PC or command 3 on a Mac. All right, I'm also going to turn off the black letters layer, which was locked, by the way. That's why we didn't end up selecting anything on it. And I'm going to expand this blend by clicking on it, and that's going to select the entire thing. And then you want to go to the object menu, and rather than choosing this command, expand appearance, which will kind of mess things up, you want to drop down to the blend submenu and choose it's expand command. And by the way, just in case you're wondering what the difference is between expand and release, release just gets rid of the blend. So it leaves you with your original Us and the spine as well, but the blend goes away, whereas if you choose expand, all of the steps are converted to individual path outlines. But it just occurs to me we're going to lose the spine, and I don't want to lose the spine. I want to be able to use it, in fact. So I'll go ahead and press the a key to switch to my white arrow tool, and I'll press control y or command y in a Mac in order to switch to the outline mode so I can see that spine. Then I'll click off it so that everything's deselected, and I'll alt or option click on it to select it independently of the blend, and I'll press control c or command c on a Mac in order to copy it. All right now I'll press control y or command y on a Mac to switch back to the preview mode. I'll press the v key in order to switch back to the black arrow tool. I'll click on the blend to select the entire thing. And then I'll return to the object menu, choose blend, and choose expand. In order to expand that blend to a bunch of individual path outlines, that happened to be grouped, by the way, as you can see indicated by the word group over here on the far left side of the control panel. Now having that group is just going to get in the way. So I'll go up to the object menu and choose the ungroup command or you can press control shift g or command shift g on the Mac, and notice if you look at the actual illustration itself, we lose the drop shadow right there, and that's because the drop shadow was assigned to the group. All right now I'm going to need to use the clipboard again. So I'm going to go ahead and paste that spine back into the document by pressing control f or command f on a mac, and that'll paste it in front as we're seeing right here. And then I'm just going to go ahead and give it a pretty big stroke of 2 points, just so I can easily keep track of it. All right now, I just happen to know from experience that I want to count my way 18 Us down the stack. And I could just count each and every U if I wanted to, but it'd be pretty difficult and I'd probably get mixed up at a point. So the easier way to work is to click on the first U with the black arrow tool in order to select it, and then notice up here in the select menu that you've got these commands. Next object above and next object below. We want next object below, which has a keyboard shortcut of control alt left bracket, or command option left bracket on a Mac. Now I'm not necessarily recommending that you memorize that keyboard shortcut for all time, but I do suggest you remember it for right now because it's going to be a heck of a lot easier than choosing this command over and over again. So I'll go ahead and choose it, and that's going to select the next guy on back so we've now selected the second U. We really want the 18th one, so I'm going to press control alt left bracket, or command option left bracket on a Mac, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 times, and then I'm going to shift click on the next one back there, which is the 19th one. And then you just want to go ahead and select the very first one over here on the far right side as well as the first one over here on the far left side, and go ahead and cut them to the clipboard by pressing control x, or command x on a Mac. And now let's get rid of all the other steps by pressing control a or command a on a Mac to select them. You don't want to get rid of the spine so I'll go ahead and zoom in here so that I can see it, and then I'll shift click on it very carefully in order to deselect it. And I'll go ahead and zoom back out and I'll press backspace, or the delete key on a Mac, to get rid of it. All right, now I want to bring back those paths that I just cut a moment ago. And I'll do so by pressing control b, or command b on a Mac, so that I'm pasting the shapes behind the spine. That'll just make things easier when I need to get rid of the spine in the future. And then I'll go ahead and click off the shapes as deselect 'em. And now I'll select these two guys right here, the very first U and the 18th U, and we're going to blend those together by going to the object menu, choosing blend and choosing make, or you've got that keyboard shortcut of control alt b, or command option b on the Mac. That's going to give us too many steps as we're seeing right here, and so I'm going to change the number of steps by going to the object menu, dropping down to blend once again, and choosing blend options. And because this guy happened to be the 18th step I need 17 between them. So I will change the spacing option to specified steps and enter 17. And now I'll just press the enter key or the return key on the Mac. All right, now you want to select this guy, the 19th step back there, and then shift click on a yellow U, and this time I'll just use that keyboard shortcut of control alt b or command option b on a Mac, which gives us 17 steps once again. So Illustrator's remembering my last setting. That's not what I want, however. So I'll just go back to the object menu, choose blend and choose blend options. And I'll chase the number of steps to the original number I had for the entire blend. Which was 110 minus this first step, which was the 19th one. So I'll go ahead and subtract it like so. That gives me 91 steps, and if I turn on the preview checkbox, that looks pretty good. All right, now click OK. Now when I say pretty good I mean terrible of course because we've got this bad angle right here. We need to match the angle of the original spine, which is why I copied it in the first place. But we're not going to be able to see things very well with our anchor points all red like this. And so I'm going to double click on this layer, the blends layer, inside the layers panel, and I'm going to change the color to this garish green right here, which is going to make things easier to see. All right now I'll press the a key to switch to the white arrow tool, and I'll click on that very first anchor point, the one for the straight spine over here on the right-hand side, and now I'll click and hold on the pen tool in order to bring out the pen tool fly out menu, and I will choose the anchor point tool. And now I'll just go ahead and drag from this guy the opposite way, though, and I'm going to keep that control handle very close to the line, like so, not quite that close, however. Something like this should work out pretty well. And then I'll go ahead and drag from this left-hand anchor point up to about this position here. And what we're trying to do is create a nice, smooth transition so that you can't tell that one blend is split from the other. And so I might just take that guy up ever so slightly, and by the way, this is going to be easier if you have your smart guides turned off. Because otherwise you can end up snapping to your original positions and so forth. All right, now I'll press the v key to switch back to my black arrow tool. And I'll click on this first U down here in the bottom left corner of the document window, and I'll press the a key again to switch to the white arrow tool, and I'll select this first anchor point right there. And I'll go ahead and grab that anchor point tool, and then I will drag up from this first anchor point to right about there. You just want to add a tiny amount of curvature, and as you can see here, everything's backing up now. All the steps are getting crammed into each other and that makes it obvious that we've got two different blends going on. So I'm going to drag from this top anchor point upward this time around in order to move the opposite control handle downward, and in about this position right here, things work out very nicely. Now you might have to play around a little bit with the control handles to get things right. Obviously I've done this before. So I'm making it look pretty easy. In any event, I'm done, so I'm going to press the v key to switch back to my black arrow tool, and I'll select that original spine and press the backspace key or the delete key to get rid of it. So I'll go up to the object menu and choose the show all command. And that will bring back all of this chaos as we're seeing right here. Now unfortunately I've managed to cover up my Us, which is something of a problem. So I'm just going to send all this stuff backward by right clicking in the document window, choosing a range, and then choosing send to back. And that way my U will end up being in front. Now I don't really want it this far in front, so I'll click off the paths to deselect everything, and I'll go ahead and select this big blend right here by clicking on it, once again with the black arrow tool, then I'll press control x or command x on a Mac, in order to cut it, and I'll click on the orange Z in order to select it, and I'll press control b or command b on a Mac in order to paste those Us in back. And now we need to restore the drop shadows. So I'll shift click on the pink U down here in the bottom left corner of the document. And I'll go up to the effect menu, choose stylize, and then choose drop shadow. And I am looking for a color of black, and opacity of 75% is just fine. I'll go ahead and turn on the preview checkbox so that we can see this big shadow that I'm creating. I'm going to mitigate things a little bit by setting the X offset to -3, and then I'll change the y offset value to 5. The default blur value of 5 points is going to work out just fine. At which point I'll click OK to accept that change. And then I'll click off the paths just so I can see how everything's working out. And it looks to me like this final Z is a little bit too high. It should come down to this point right here so that we're not seeing it's drop shadow. In other words the drop shadow's going to be covered up by this blend right here, and so I'll go ahead and select the Z blend, and I'll press the a key in order to switch to the white arrow tool. I'll select this point at the end of its spine and I'll just use my arrow keys to nudge this guy into what I deemed to be a better position, such as this location right here. And then I'll click off the path in order to deselect it. All right, that's it. Now I'll just go ahead and turn on the black letters layer here inside the layers panel, to reveal the completed version of the artwork. And that is how you cut one object blend across another, that is through the side of its accordion extrusion, in order to create a more tightly integrated effect here inside Illustrator.

Contents