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

734 Using the Puppet Warp tool in Illustrator CC

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

734 Using the Puppet Warp tool in Illustrator CC

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Now lately, I have been a little bit critical of Illustrator CC. For one thing, Adobe has taken the Pen Tool, am I right about this, the best tool in the software, and turned it into a kind of stubby goat's huff, which I find, I mean, I'm, am I the only one who finds it unpleasant to use the tool anymore? I mean it's like looking at my face without a goatee. And then there's the Properties panel, which I think we can all agree is a waste of space. But there is one new feature that is so great it makes up for everything else, and that is the Puppet Warp Tool. And I'm going to show you how we can use that tool in Illustrator CC 2018 and going forward to take this bat skeleton and make it all funky. And you may look at this and say, Deke, that is ridiculous. You're the one with the software flaw, and that may be true, but it's demonstrative, right? You can see that we're making a big difference where this bat skeleton is concerned. And that's something that would've taken us so much effort before, right? Which makes the Puppet Warp Tool either the biggest time saver, or because it's so fun, the biggest time waster in Illustrator. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. Alright, so here we are inside Illustrator CC 2018 or later, could be, looking at a piece of artwork from the Dreamstime image library about which you can learn more and get some great deals at dreamstime.com/deke.php. And one of the great things about this library is that it contains tons and tons of vector objects that you can integrate into your own artwork. Alright, so we're currently looking at a couple of path outlines. There is this black bat skeleton, which is one big compound path as indicated by the words Compound Path over here in the far-left side of the horizontal control panel. And then behind that, we have this purple path outline. Let's say that we want to warp both of these objects together. Then you just want to make sure they're both selected, and I'm going to do just that by partially marqueeing these two objects with the Black Arrow Tool, and then you want to switch to the Puppet Warp Tool, which looks like a little pushpin. And I'm going to go ahead and click at this position right here in order to lay down a pin. And notice that by default, Illustrator also presents me with this mesh, which as you can see is a network of adjacent triangles. And that just shows me how the puppet warp effect is put together. Now at this point, you may get a warning, in fact, you may get several warnings, one of which tells you that you need three or more pins in order to get decent effects. That's not necessarily true, you can just lay down one pin if you'd like, in which case dragging it around is going to move the entire object, so that's not especially useful. However, you can get halfway-decent results out of laying down just two pins. And so, I'm going to click right there in order to lay down a second pin like so, and then I'll move it around, and notice the key to what's going on here is that one of these pins is moving because I'm dragging it, and the other is remaining stationary. And so deselected pins resist movement, whereas everything else moves with respect to that deselected pin. Alright, I'm going to move this guy back up a little bit, because I actually want to lock down his shoulders, and I'm going to do that by clicking in each one of the shoulders like so. And notice that every time you click, it's very possible that you're going to apply a small degree of movement. Alright, now I'll click right here in the center of the pelvis, and now notice if I go ahead and drag that wing around that I'm moving it more or less independently of all the other pins, and because we have so many pins in place, there's not all that much movement going on elsewhere inside the selected path outlines. Now let's say that you want to move a couple of pins at the same time, in that case just go ahead and Shift-click on a pin to add it to the selection. So notice that these two pins with the bright centers are selected, and now if I were to drag them, they will move together independently of the deselected pins. Another options by the way is to select a pin and then notice if I move my cursor slightly out into this ring that I get a rotate cursor, which tells me that I can rotate these legs back and forth. And the reason that I'm rotating both of the legs is because A, it looks very silly, and B, I don't have any pins laid down on the knees or the feet or anything below the pelvis. If I were to lock down the foot, and notice how it moved as soon as I laid a pin down there, I can now drag it to a different location. I can rotate it by dragging the ring, or I can switch back to the pelvis and rotate it, and notice that that foot remains locked down. So you can think of pins not only as tools for warping your artwork like so, but you can also think of them as locking mechanisms. Alright and finally, I'm going to go ahead and click at the bottom of the head right there at the chin, and notice how that slightly distorted the artwork, and now I'll just go ahead and drag the head upward so that we have this kind of ET neck. And by the way, if this mesh of adjacent triangles is getting in your way, you can go up here to the Control Panel and turn off the Show Mesh checkbox. And then if you want to hide the pins and apply your effect, then just go ahead and switch back to some other tool, such as the black arrow up here at the top of the toolbox. After which point, I'll just go ahead and click off the objects to deselect them. And that my friends is how you take advantage of the very powerful Puppet Warp Tool here inside Illustrator CC 2018 or later. So am I right? It's best new tool ever. Shame on those other features, look to the Puppet Warp Tool, make yourself better. But that's not it, there's all kinds of other stuff, which is why next week I'm going to show you a bunch of Puppet Warp Tool tips and tricks. And we're going to take this triceratops right here, what's the problem buddy? Why is your head down? Here's mournful about the Pen Tool. And he's going to hold his head high. Deke's Techniques each and every week, keep watching.

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