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

746 Expressing pentagons as proper tile patterns

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

746 Expressing pentagons as proper tile patterns

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland, welcome to Deke's Techniques. Now we've been having a lot of fun, it's been like a party actually, with this Type 15 irregular convex pentagon, but so far we have been tessellating it manually, which may have made you wonder, can we turn this into an automatically repeating tile pattern inside Illustrator? And the answer is yes. This whole thing fits inside of a rectangle. Here, let me show you exact how it works. All right, let's take that incredibly complicated Type 15 pentagon pattern that we had to assemble by hand and turn it into an automatically repeating tile pattern, and a rectangular one at that, here inside Illustrator. Now if you have access to this exercise file then it should automatically open on the last artboard. If not, you can advance to that artboard by pressing ctrl + shift + PgDn, that's cmd + shift + PgDn on the Mac. Now the first thing we need to do is figure out how these pentagons repeat inside of a rectangle. Now the ultimate rectangle is the artboard itself and so I'm gonna bring the artboard up on screen by going to the View menu and choosing Show Artboards. And then we can see this rectangular region right here, which doesn't really fully contain the pattern. And to show you what I mean I'm gonna zoom in just a little bit here and I'm gonna turn on this demos layer, which is empty where this particular artboard is concerned, and I'll click on it to make it active. And then I'm gonna grab my Rectangle Tool. And you wanna go up here to the control panel and go ahead and change the fill, which is the first swatch, to None, and then change the stroke, which is the second swatch, to white. That'll just allow us to better see what we're doing. And so what you wanna do is draw a rectangle that contains a repeating area of this pattern. Which is a daunting prospect and basically nigh on impossible as you're about to see. But what you wanna do is basically start at a landmark. And so you can choose any landmark you want, but I'm gonna choose this purplish pentagon right here and I'm gonna start at its nose, so the top right corner. And I'm gonna drag down to the nose of some other purple pentagon. Now I don't really know which one I should go for, so I'll just choose this guy let's say. And I'll increase my line weight a little bit, so that you can see that rectangle on screen. And what we want is for this purple pentagon to appear not only outside the bottom left corner right there, so it's inside the top right corner, outside the bottom left corner, but it should be right here outside the bottom right corner as well, and just to the left of the top left corner if we want this pattern to repeat seamlessly. Now that's not happening, of course. And I dare say, it's never going to happen the way things are structured right now. Which can leave you wondering what to do. Well, here's the solution. I'm gonna go ahead and get rid of that rectangle. And then I'm gonna scroll down here to the original 12 pentagons that are repeated dynamically, as you may recall. And so I'll press the v key to switch to my black arrow tool up here at the top of the toolbox, and I'll click on these guys to select this entire group. And I'll just go ahead and make a copy of it by dragging it down and to the right and I'll press the alt key or the opt key on the Mac and drop it into place. Once again, pressing alt or opt creates a duplicate. Now we're bringing over all the other dynamic transformations as well. And to get rid of them to up to the Window menu and choose the Appearance command, which is gonna bring up the Appearance panel. And then click on Transform. Not the word Transform, that'll bring up the dialog box, instead you wanna just click in an empty region over here and then Shift + click on an empty region for the next one, and then drop down to the little trashcan icon in the bottom right corner of the Appearance panel and click on it to get rid of all those dynamic transformations. All right, I'm just gonna drag this guy down a little bit. So here I am working in the pasteboard, which is not a problem, actually it works out great. And so now what you wanna do is drag this group by the bottom right corner right here and then have it snap into place at this location right there. And you wanna make sure that you're seeing the white snapping cursor, very, very important, don't settle for anything less. And then you wanna press and hold the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac, so you're seeing two white snapping cursors, and then release in order to create a copy. And now we wanna create a few additional copies by pressing ctrl + d for duplicate, that's cmd + d on the Mac. And all we need is five, as it just so happens. You wouldn't know it going into it, but that is what I figured out. All right, now what we wanna do is measure the edge of our rectangle. And you can do that using the Line Tool. So go ahead and grab the Line Tool from the Line Tool fly-out menu right here. And you're gonna need your Smart Guides, so I'll go up to the View menu and make sure they're turned on. In my case they're not, so I'll choose the command in order to turn them on. And then you wanna drag from any anchor point to an equivalent anchor point. I'm gonna start right here and I'm gonna drag up and to the left, like so, until I snap to the equivalent anchor point. So in this case the bottom right point associated with this brown shape right here. And notice in the heads up display I'm seeing that the angle is 151 degrees. You may see a different angle, namely 150 degrees, because that's what it really is. And to show you what I mean I'll just go ahead and release and then I'll click with the tool to bring up the Line Segment Tool Options dialog box, which happens to be more accurate, and it's telling me the Angle is exactly 150 degrees. That's the information you want. So if you like you can go ahead and copy it just by selecting it and pressing Control + C or Command + C on the Mac, the Cancel out. We don't really need that line, we were just using it as a measuring tool. And yes, I do prefer the Line Tool to the Measure Tool inside Illustrator, because well, it just works a lot better. It's been updated over time and so forth. All right, so I'm gonna go ahead and press the Backspace key or the Delete key to get rid of that line. And I'll press the V key to switch back to my black arrow tool. And I'll go ahead and select these guys just by partially marqueeing them. And because they're grouped together they're all gonna light up. That is to say, you'll select all of them. And then what you wanna do is switch to the Rotate Tool, which you can get by pressing the r key. And next, just go ahead and alt or opt + click really at any one of these anchor points to bring up the Rotate dialog box. And this does happen to be the right angle and here's why. You wanna enter 180 minus Command + V. That is the paste or 150 degrees there. So 180, which is absolutely horizontal, minus that value that you recorded with the Line Tool, then press the Tab key and you will end up with an Angle of 30 degrees. Then go ahead and click OK in order to rotate those shapes into a position that will accommodate a rectangular tile pattern. Now you wanna press the V key to switch back to your black arrow tool and go ahead and grab this anchor point right here down at the bottom. And you'll want your Bounding Box to be turned off, by the way. Don't have the Bounding Box on. So notice in my case the command reads Show Bounding Box, in which case I see this Bounding Box here, which is gonna let me stretch this thing around, which is no where near what I want. So I'll go ahead and undo that, go up to the View menu, and turn off what is ultimately a function for babies most of the time. All right, so now that I have access to my anchor points I'll go ahead and drag this guy straight up while pressing the shift key in order to constrain the angle of my drag to exactly vertical. And then I'll go ahead and snap this guy into alignment, like so. And I'll add the Alt key, that's the Option key on the Mac, so I have both Shift and Alt pressed, that's Shift and Option on the Mac. At which point I'll release in order to create a copy of those shapes, like so. All right, now go ahead and Shift + marquee the original ones right here, so that all of these shapes are selected. And then you wanna go up to the Object menu, choose Pattern, and choose Make. Which is gonna take you into Illustrator's pattern generator. Now this alert message is telling you how this wacky feature works, but you can just go ahead and click OK, 'cause I'm gonna walk you through it here. Now the first thing you wanna do is change the name of the pattern, that's just a good idea. And in my case I'm gonna call it Type 15. And then we need to come up with a better way for this pattern to repeat. 'Cause notice if I zoom out here it is currently repeating with a ton of gaps, which of course, is not what we want. So go ahead and zoom back in here and then you wanna switch to this tool, the Pattern Tile Tool, which is available inside the Pattern Options panel. And notice that switches you away from the black arrow tool, so this is a bonafide tool right here. And then what we wanna do is drag this corner right here and in this case having a Bounding Box is very nice. And so I'll just go ahead and drag this guy to this location right there, actually that's not far enough in. Notice that we still have a gap right there. And so I'll drag it to this position. You just wanna make sure that you're snapping to an anchor point. Now things are still off a little bit and so to better see what I'm doing I'm gonna change this Copies option here to one by one. So we're not really seeing any copies. And that will allow me to notice that I haven't done this right. I need to drag this guy over quite a bit. Let's see, I can't drag it this far over, because I'm revealing a gap right here at this location and down here as well. So I'll drag to here, let's say. And notice that I'm snapping into alignment. And then I'll drag this guy, not over to here, that would be the other side of that orange polygon, but to the beginning of the orange polygon, so that we're connecting to equivalent anchor points. And then I'll go ahead and drag the bottom of the rectangle up to right here. So notice how we have this orange rectangle, which is serving as a kind of sign post. It's partially in at the top right corner, it's all the way out down here at the bottom right corner, it's all the way out at the bottom left corner, and it's partially in at the top left corner. Do you see what I mean? Because it's very important that you do, because this is how it's going to repeat successfully. And to demonstrate what I mean I'll go ahead and change Copies to five by five, let's say, so we can see a bunch of copies occurring. And then I'll turn off this Dim Copies to checkbox, so that we can see that this thing is indeed going to tesselate properly. All right, now all you need to do to create this new pattern is to click the Done button, don't click Cancel, click Done, or you can just go ahead and press the Escape key and that'll take you back to Illustrator proper. And you will see that you have a new tile here in your Swatches panel. And if you're not seeing the Swatches panel just go up to the Window menu and choose the Swatches command. All right, I'm gonna go ahead and center what should still be the active artboard by pressing Control + 0 or Command + 0 on the Mac. And then I'll switch back to the Layers panel. I want my demos layer to be active. I'm gonna go ahead and turn off the patterns layer, so that I can see the original Type 15 definition. And I'm gonna paste in a rectangle that I've created in advance just by pressing ctrl + f, cmd + f on a Mac. That's not gonna work for you, because you didn't copy a rectangle. I just want mine to be the proper size, so it looks good on screen. In your case you might just wanna grab the Rectangle Tool or any of the shape tools for that matter. You can fill any shape you'd like. And then with the shape active I'll just go up to this first swatch on the far left side of the control panel, click on it, and select my new type 15 pattern. And notice that it repeats seamlessly. And that's how you take a terribly intricate Type 15 pentagon pattern and turn it into an automatically repeating rectangular tile pattern here inside Illustrator. All right, so what's the point of having a tile pattern if we're not gonna use it to fill or stroke something? Which is why if you're a member of lynda.com slash LinkedIn Learning we're gonna do exactly that. In a couple of follow-up movies we're going to use that tile pattern to fill this cow, as well as its background. And you can see, we're scaling and we're rotating, all sorts of stuff that we can do. If you're looking forward to next week we're gonna bid a fond farewell to our Type 15 pattern as we combine it with a photograph inside Photoshop and we're gonna turn Illustrator into Photoshop's slave. That's a function of Smart Objects by the way. That's why they're not called kind objects or thoughtful objects. Deke's Techniques, each and every week, keep watching.

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