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

828 Expressing your triangles as a hex pattern

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

828 Expressing your triangles as a hex pattern

- [Instructor] In this movie, we're going to take our blended triangles and we're going to duplicate them a few times in order to create this seamlessly repeating hex pattern. All right, the first thing I want to do is duplicate this layer, just so I don't harm the original. And I'm going to do that by dragging this guy and dropping it onto this little Page icon. Then I'll turn off the original, and I'll double click in an empty portion of the new layer in order to bring up the Layer Options dialog box, and I'll go ahead and call this guy hexangles, and then I'll change the color to Violet, and click OK. All right now, I want to zoom out by pressing Control + 0, or Command + 0 on the Mac, but perhaps not that far out. And then I'll turn on the guides layer, so that I can see my center guides as well as this placeholder text. And now you want to go ahead and partially marquee your triangles in order to select them, then go up to the View menu and make sure of a couple things. You want your Smart Guides to be turned on, that's very important, and if this command reads "Hide Bounding Box," go ahead and choose it. If it says "Show Bounding Box," you're fine, so you can just Escape out. Now you want to drag this guy by its bottom left anchor point until your cursor snaps to the intersection of those two center guides, at which point, you can release. All right, now I want to rotate a bunch of duplicates of these shapes, and you can do that using the Rotate tool, which has a keyboard shortcut of R. And now I'll go ahead and Alt or Option click at the intersection of those two guidelines, which is going to force the display of the Rotate dialog box as well as set the origin point right there, and we're looking for an angle of 60 degrees, and in case you're wondering why, we're taking a 360 degree circle and we're dividing it by six equilateral triangles. And you can see, if I press the Tab key that that gets us 60 degrees. At which point, I'll click the Copy button in order to create a copy of those triangles. And now, I'll repeat that rotation and duplication by pressing Control + D, or Command + D on the Mac, as many times as it takes to fill out that hexagon of triangles. All right, now we need to measure how big this hexagon is, and notice this arrow. It's telling us the direction we need to drag. And so, I'll go ahead and once again select my Polygon tool from the Shape tool flyout menu, and I'll drag from the center out. And if you followed along with my instructions in the previous movie, then very likely you'll be drawing a triangle. We want a hexagon, so press the Up Arrow key in order to increase the number of sides until we have a total of six sides, and then drag down to this point right here, at which point, because the Smart Guides are turned on, I'm seeing a Heads Up display that's telling me that the width of this hexagon is 692.82 points, and the height is 600 points. Well, as long as that information is fresh in my head, I'll go ahead and select the Type tool, which you can get by pressing the T key, and then I'll select that width value and I'll set it to 692.82, like so, and then I'll select that value and press Control + C, or Command + C on the Mac, to copy it, and that way I can just paste it later. And then I'll set the height value to 600 points, which is a lot easier to remember, and I'll press the Escape key in order to accept that change and return to the Black Arrow tool. And now I'll click that big hexagon that I just created, and I'll drag it down the stack. Notice that we're seeing a tiny purple square. That tells me that the polygon is on this hexangles layer. I want it to be on the guides layer, so I'll go ahead and drag it down the stack, like so. And then I'll turn it into a custom guide, by going to the View menu, choosing Guides, and then choosing Make Guides. All right, now we want to turn this guy into a pattern, and so I'm going to turn off the guides layer for now, and I'll press Control + A, or Command + A on the Mac, in order to select all the visible art work, and then I'll go to the Object menu, choose Pattern, and choose this guy right here, Make. And that will take me into the pattern editing mode. Now this hexagon has a flat top and a flat bottom, and so go ahead and change the Tile Type to Hex by Column, which features an icon with a flat top and a flat bottom. And I'll click on the word name in order to highlight the pattern name, and I'll go ahead and call this guy hexangles once again. Now, notice that Illustrator has very nearly gotten the size right. The problem is that the strokes don't exactly overlap each other, and so what we're going to need to do is take the height value down, so I'll just click in it and press the Down Arrow key twice, so that it's exactly 600 points, and then you can select the width value, and paste that value that you copied just a moment ago, or you can just change the four before the period to a two, and that will give you an even more exacting result, because notice that we have 692.82. That's what we discovered with the Polygon tool, followed by 04, so it's just slightly more accurate. All right, now you can accept your changes by clicking on the Done button up here at the top of the screen, or you can just press the Escape key. All right, now I'm going to create a big rectangle and fill it with a pattern, and I'm going to do that on an independent layer. So I'll drop down to the little Page icon at the bottom of the Layers panel, and I'll Alt or Option click on it to force the display of the Layer Options dialog box, and I'll just go ahead and call this guy pattern, and then I'll change the color to Grass Green, and then I'll click OK. And now I'll zoom out, by pressing Control + Minus, or Command + Minus a bunch of times, and then I'll go ahead and select the Rectangle tool from the Shape tool flyout menu. And notice this red bleed boundary. I'm going to drag from the top left corner of that boundary down to the bottom right corner in order to fill the entire bleed with the rectangle. And now I'll click on this second color swatch up here in the Control panel in order to change the Stroke to none, and then I'll click on this first color swatch and I'll change the Fill to this new guy, hexangles, which will produce this terribly confusing effect right here. And the reason it's all messed up in the center is because much of this layer is transparent, and we're seeing the original hexangles in the background. So I'll go ahead and turn that guy off. And then, I'll turn the guides back on, and what I want to do is take that center right there, and move it to the intersection of the guides, and you can do that by switching back to the Black Arrow tool, which you can get by pressing the V key, and then press the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac, to bring up the Move dialog box. Now, we don't want to move the rectangle. We just want to move the pattern inside the rectangle, so turn off this checkbox right here, Transform Objects, and that will ensure that Transform Patterns is turned on. And then, I found the best thing to do was to set the horizontal position value to negative 16 points, and then I'll set the vertical position to 36 points, like so, and that goes ahead and centers the pattern inside the document, at which point I'll click OK to accept that change, and then I'll zoom in a little bit as well, and I'll go ahead and turn that guides layer off, and I'll also press Control + Shift + A, or Command + Shift + A on the Mac, in order to deselect the rectangle. And that is how you turn your various triangle tunnels into a seamlessly repeating tile pattern here inside Illustrator.

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