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

702 Object blends and dynamic distortions in Illustrator

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

702 Object blends and dynamic distortions in Illustrator

- Hey, gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Now, this week, we're going to take that artwork that we refined last week inside Adobe Illustrator which contains a bunch of object blends that are cutting through and slicing across each other, and we're going to roughen up the edges using what I call path wigglers, but officially, they're known as dynamic distortions, and a great thing about this is that even though object blends were first introduced in Illustrator 88 back in 1988, dynamic distortions came along in Illustrator 9, many years later. These two features are entirely compatible with each other so we have a live, editable piece of artwork. Now, specifically, we're going to be working with two commands, Tweak, and Zig Zag, and in case you've ever wondered how these features work, I'm going to show you exactly how they work in this movie. All right, here's the final version of our various dynamic distortions, just so you have a chance to see it on screen. We're going to start off inside this file, the one that we created last week, although I will admit to having modified the color scheme. All right, the first thing I'm going to do is turn off the black letters layer here inside the layers panel, just so we can better see what we're doing, and I'm going to start things off with the P, so I'm going to press the A key to switch to my white arrow tool, and then I'll click in this region down here and in this case, I ended up selecting an entire blend, the one that begins with the yellow Z, and that's not what I want, but the reason it happened is that I clicked on its drop shadow, so, I need to move my cursor over a little bit and click right about there, in order to select this entire P shape and now, I'm going to distort it by going up to the Effect menu, choosing Distort & Transform, and choosing Tweak. And what Tweak does is it moves around the anchor points and the control handles randomly inside of a given range. So for example, if I switch to Absolute, and then change both the horizontal and vertical values to five points, then Illustrator is allowed to move these various guys, the anchor points, and the control handles, is what's meant by Control Points here, by as much as five points, either up, down, or left or right. Now, it's not in fact moving them. It's moving them dynamically, and it is a random effect, by the way, which is why if I turn on the preview checkbox, my effect and yours will look slightly different. At which point, I'll go ahead and click OK to apply that effect, and notice, even though it's only selecting this first path, the one down here at the bottom, all the other paths in the blend are updating in kind, and to show you what that looks like, I'm going to press the V key to switch to the black arrow tool and then I'm going to click on this yellow P in the top left corner of the art board, and I'll go to the select menu and choose Inverse, in order to select everything else instead, and then I'll go to the object menu, choose Hide, and then choose Selection, or you have that keyboard shortcut of Control + 3, or Command + 3 on a Mac. And that way, we can see the entire P blend here, and notice that it starts off very tweaked down here at the bottom, and becomes less and less distorted as we move toward the yellow P. All right, just so we can really see what's happening here, I'm going to bring back the other blends one at a time by twirling open the blends layer here inside the Layers panel, and then I'll scroll down here to the bottom and I'll turn on this guy which is the rear L as well as this one, which represents the side of the L by itself, so to show you what I mean, I'll go ahead and turn off the big L for a second. That's just the back of the L, and here's the front. All right, so we're just going to distort the back of the L by once again pressing the A key to switch to the white arrow tool and clicking right about here, in order to select this shape, so you should just see a partial shape like so, at which point I'll go up to the Effect menu, choose Distort & Transform, and this time, I'll drop down to Zig Zag, which pretty much does what it says, if I turn on the Preview checkbox, you can see that the path is now zigging and zagging back and forth. I don't want quite that much action. I do want Absolute to be selected. Otherwise, if you select Relative, you're going to work with percents, which is a little harder to predict, so I'll go with Absolute and I'll take this guy down to six points and I'll set the ridges per segment value to three, and that is ridges per each one of these real segments, by the way, so we're just going to have a few ridges in these long segments, and then they're going to get very spiky indeed inside the short segments. All right, I want my points to be smooth points, so we have some waving transitions here, at which point I'll click OK in order to accept that change. And now I'm going to move this path outline over a little bit and the reason is, that you can see the undistorted shape in the background, and so assuming that my keyboard increment is one point, I'll press Shift + Left Arrow twice in order to move that shape 20 points to the left and then I'll press Shift + Down Arrow once to move it 10 points down, and it looks like that's a little bit too far. I'm starting to reveal this thing right here in the background, so, I'll press the Up Arrow key to nudge that guy up until I can no longer see the L shape behind it. All right, now I'll just go ahead and press Control + Shift + A or Command + Shift + A on the Mac in order to de-select my artwork and I'll press Control + 0 or Command + 0 on the Mac to center my zoom. All right, now let's bring back the blends associated with the U. I'll start with this very front blend, up here at the top of the blends layer, and I'll go ahead and click right about there with my white arrow tool, to select the rear U and then I'll go up to the Effect menu and I'll choose this guy, Zig Zag dot dot dot, which is going to allow me to repeat the Zig Zag effect and enter new values. And so I'll go ahead and choose that command, turn on the Preview checkbox. You can see that's way too much, which is why I'm going to take that size value down to just a single point like so, which gives us a little bit of a wave over the course of that blend, so we don't have any distortion at the beginning and then the steps become progressively more and more distorted, at which point I'll click OK to accept that change. Now I'm going to bring back the other parts of the U, which include this guy right here, which is the central area, and this guy as well, and I'm going to press the V key to switch to my black arrow tool, and I'll select this blend and then Shift + Click on this one to select it as well, and I'm going to repeat that last effect over the course of two entire blends by choosing this very first command from the Effect menu, Apply Zig Zag, which is just going to repeat my last settings. Now, Zig Zag, by the way, is not a random filter, so your effect and mine are going to be one and the same. Now, all of these effects are dynamic, incidentally, which means you can change your mind any time you like by going up to the Window menu and choosing the Appearance command, which is going to bring up this Zig Zag item right here. All you have to do is click on it in order to revisit your settings, then turn on the preview checkbox and then I can take this guy up to, let's say, three points, and we get much more of a pronounced effect. I could also take down my ridges per segment value if I want to, and that is going to reduce the number of zigzags. I don't want to do either of those things, however, so I'm just going to cancel out to accept what I have. And there you have it, that's how you combine object blends which were first introduced in Illustrator 88 about a hundred years ago, with dynamic distortions, and in the end, we'll achieve this effect here. Now, if you're a member of Lynda.com/LinkedInLearning, I have a followup movie in which I show you how to apply yet another dynamic distortion in the form of the roughen effect inside Illustrator, and so for the sake of comparison, I've gone ahead and separated out these letters here. We have the P, which is subject to the Tweak effect as we saw in this movie, L is subject to Zig Zag, and then, as we'll see in the followup movie, E is subject to Roughen, so if nothing else, I think you'll find it very useful to know exactly how these dynamic distortions work. If you're looking forward to next week, I'll show you how to apply two dynamic warp distortions once again inside Illustrator, in the form of Fish and Twist, applied to these two letter Zs. Deke's Techniques, each and every week! Keep watching.

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