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

705 Adding a dynamic background, part 1

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

705 Adding a dynamic background, part 1

- [Instructor] In this movie, we're going to take our object blends complete with their dynamic distortions here inside Illustrator, and we're going to add this equally dynamic background. And the idea here is that I want to cement the skills that I've been passing along so far. And I'm going to start off inside this file, which includes an additional layer called sizzle, which contains a bunch of geometric shapes, including ellipses, rectangles, and straight lines. All right, now I'll just go ahead and zoom out, and I'm going to turn off these top three layers, just by dragging over their eyeballs. Now I've been showing you the locations of all the commands, as well as including keyboard shortcuts. However, I've got a lot to do here, and so I'm going to work the way I naturally work, which is relying on keyboard shortcuts almost exclusively when and if they exist. And so I'm going to start off by blending these ellipses, and so I'll go ahead and click with the black arrow tool, on the big blue ellipse, and then I'll shift-click on the smaller orange one. And then, as opposed to going up to the object menu, choosing blend and then choosing make, I'm just going to take advantage of the keyboard shortcut which is control-alt-B here on the PC, that's command-option-B on a Mac. Now, I don't want nearly this many steps, because after all, it is resulting in these weird moire patterns. And so I'm going to get to the blend options dialog box by switching to the blend tool, which you can get, for what it's worth, by pressing the W key. And then I'll just press the enter key, or the return key on the Mac, to bring up the blend options dialog box. Now notice, in my case, spacing is set to smooth color. All you need to do these days, if you want to switch to steps, is press the down arrow key. That's going to take you to specified steps, then it should light up the steps value, as well. I'm going to go ahead and set that guy to 30, and turn on the preview check box, at which point you can see each and every one of the steps. And we're seeing strokes as well, because the inner and outermost ellipse each have a one point stroke. At which point, I'll go ahead and click okay to accept that change. All right, now I want to roughen things up, and so I'm going to press the A key to switch to my white arrow tool. I'll click off the paths to deselect them, and then I'll click right about here in order to select the outermost path independently of the innermost one. Notice that I am not selecting any of the intervening steps, because this is a dynamic effect. Now I'll go up to the effect menu, choose distort and transform, and choose the roughen command. And I'll go ahead and change the first value to 20, and then I'll tab down to the detail value, and change it to 20 as well, and I'll change the style of points from corner to smooth, and I'll turn on the preview check box. And you can see that the effect at this point is way over the top. Now interestingly, and I want you to notice this, the very first ellipse, the innermost one, is not roughed up at all, and then every step afterwards is progressively roughed up, until things get very herky-jerky indeed. The problem is that size is still set to relative, so it's measured in percentages, which is not what I want. So I'll go ahead and select the absolute option, which is going to change the unit to points. And we're going to see a much more reasonable effect, at which point, I'll click okay. So again, the innermost ellipse is not roughed up at all, and each step is progressively roughed up until we reach the outermost ellipse. All right, I want some roughness on the inside as well, just not quite as much. So I'll go ahead and click on that orange ellipse to select it. And then, notice, if you go to the effect menu, the second command now reads roughen dot dot dot, which means we can reapply the effect with different settings. Notice it has a keyboard shortcut of mash-your-fist E, so in other words, control-shift-alt-E here on the PC. That's going to be command-shift-option-E on the Mac. All right so, I'll go ahead and tab to that first value there, size, and I'll change it to 10 points, and then I'll change detail to 10 per inch, turn on the preview check box, and you can see that we get a little bit of roughening on the inside, that becomes incredibly rougher as it goes out. And now I'll click okay in order to accept that effect. And notice it kind of jumped around right there, and that's because roughen is a random filter, it's going to produce a different effect every time. All right, now I'm going to press the V key to switch back to my black arrow tool, and I'll go ahead and click, and shift-click on these white looking lines right there. And I say white looking, because they're actually double stroked. And now I'll go ahead and blend them by pressing control-alt-B, that's command-option-B on the Mac. That's not enough steps so I'll press the W key to switch to the blend tool down here, and then I'll press the enter key, or the return key on the Mac, to bring up the blend options dialog box. Press the down arrow key to switch spacing and specified steps, and I will dial in a total of five steps. I just happen to know that works. And I'll turn on the preview check box, so we can see the change occur on screen. At which point, I'll click okay in order to accept that change. Now, I want to roughen these guys up, so I'll press control-shift-alt-E, that's command-shift-option-E on the Mac, to bring up the roughen dialog box. Turn on the preview check box, and I'm going to take this first value size down to five points, like so, and that'll give us just a little bit of roughness, and then I'll click okay. And then, I actually want this center line to be a little thicker, so I'll press the A key to switch to my white arrow tool. Click off the lines to deselect them, and then just click on this guy in order to partially select it, that's fine. Now what you want to do, is go up to the window menu, and choose the appearance command to bring up the appearance panel, and notice we have a couple of strokes right here. I'm going to change the top stroke to three points, and I'll change the bottom stroke, this pale yellow one, to six points in order to thicken it up a little bit. And as you can see, blending does account for line noise. So the lines start very thin on the outside and become thicker toward the center. All right, now I'll go ahead and click on this white shape there, in order to select it, this white triangle. And I'm going to go up to the opacity option, and set it to just 5%, so that we have a very translucent object indeed. And then I'll shift-click on this shape, right there, and if I shift-click on its inside, you'll notice that I select the entire thing. It's set to 100% opacity, blends do account for opacity. So if I press control-alt-B, or command-option-B on the Mac, you can see that things are fading from translucent on the outside, to opaque on the inside. Now, I want fewer steps than that, and so I'm going to press the W key to switch to the blend tool, and I'll press the enter key, or the return key on the Mac, to bring up the blend options dialog box. Press the down arrow key in order to switch spacing to specified steps, and I'll change the number of steps to 18. And that's because I really want 20 steps in all, but I need to subtract the outermost shape, and the innermost shape, and that gives me 18. And by the way, you can do the math if you prefer, so you do 20 minus two, for example, then press the tab key, Illustrator does the math for you, and then I'll click okay. And now, if I were to zoom in here a little bit, you can see that all the steps are visible, and they are now stepping in 5% increments, that is 5% opacity increments. All right, I'll press control-shift-A, or command-shift-A on the Mac to deselect my artwork, and I'll press the V key to switch to the black arrow tool. And I'll click on this rectangle, and shift-click on this one, notice that I've rotated both shapes. And then I'll blend between them by pressing control-alt-B, or command-option-B on the Mac. I want absolute control over the number of steps, so I'll press the W key to switch to the blend tool, and press the enter or return key to bring up the blend options dialog box. Notice that I'm seeing the last step's value. I'll just go ahead and tab over to it, and set it to 12 instead. Turn on the preview check box, and you can see that we end up with fewer steps, at which point I'll click okay. All right, now I want to add a little bit of additional interest here, and to make things clear, I'm going to switch back to the layers panel and I'm going to turn those layers on, like so, so that we can see the background art in the context of the overall artwork. And I'm going to go ahead and lock these guys down, so only the sizzle layer is unlocked. And then I'll go up to the effect menu, once again, choose distort and transform, but this time I want the transform command. And the great thing about this command, is that it allows you to apply dynamic transformations here inside Illustrator, and you can also repeat your transformations. So let's say I set the rotate value to 20 degrees, and then I turn on the preview check box, and that just goes ahead and rotates those selected shapes. I actually want to rotate a total of four versions of these shapes, so I'm going to click in the copies value right there, and press the up arrow key one, two, three times. And that's going to give me four iterations in all, because after all, we have one original and three copies, at which point, I'll click okay to accept that change. And now, I'll return to the effect menu, and drop down to these Photoshop filters right here, and I'll choose blur, and then radial blur, so the old school radial blur filter. By default, the amount setting is 10, the blur method is spin, and the quality setting is good. Which is just fine, I'm going to leave everything alone, because, after all, I don't know what this is going to look like, because there is no preview. So this is one of those old filters that doesn't allow you to preview the effect. So I'll just go ahead and click okay in order to see what I got, which is way too much blur. And so I'm going to return to the window menu, and once again choose the appearance command to, again, bring up the appearance panel, at which point I will see radial blur right there. So when you're working with dynamic effects in Illustrator, it's just like working with dynamic filters, that is smart filters, inside Photoshop. The difference is that you don't have to convert your artwork to a smart object in advance, any old path outline will do. And so, I'll just go ahead and click on radial blur, and then I'll dial in a smaller amount value, such as three, let's say, and I'll click okay in order to reduce the impact of that effect. At which point, I think it looks quite good. And now I'll just press the V key to switch back to my black arrow tool, I'll press control-shift-A, or command-shift-A to deselect the artwork, and I'll go ahead and zoom on in as well. All right, now notice if I switch to the final version of the artwork that I showed you at the beginning of the movie, that these wiggling path outlines switch around. So this is the effect as it appears now and this is how it looked the previous time I created this effect. And that's because roughen is an entirely random filter, whereas the transform and radial blur effects, down here in the bottom left corner, look the same. Now I am missing a couple of objects, this red bush-like object, in the bottom left corner, and this orange object in the top right corner, and we will be adding these finishing touches in the very next movie.

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