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

728 Combining the best of E.T. and Jurassic Park

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

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728 Combining the best of E.T. and Jurassic Park

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- Hey gang this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. This week we're gonna kick off the summer movie season by combining what I'm calling the best of two classic Steven Spielberg movies, E.T. and Jurassic Park in order to create this bicycle riding T-Rex set against this lunar background in order to create this awesome piece of poster art. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. Alright here's the final bicycle riding dinosaur, just so you can see him on screen. Now we're gonna start things off inside Illustrator at which point you can see that I have opened this bicycle that comes to us 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 working with this stock library is you don't have to draw your own bicycle. Now I noticed that this bike does not have a basket and that's because our dinosaur isn't carrying around an alien; he is the alien. Also notice that I've set things up so that if you click on the pedals right here you can rotate them to any angle you like just by switching to the rotate tool which you can get by pressing the r key and then you want to alt or option click at the center between those two pedals to bring up the rotate dialogue box and then assuming the preview check box is turned on, you can just go ahead and rotate these pedals in any way that you like. But if you do, I'll go ahead and click okay to accept that change, make sure to note the fact that we have this little bit of a cover up on the spokes right there. And you can move that by pressing the a key to switch to the white arrow tool and then clicking in that object right there and then moving it and of course rotating it into a different position. However I'm gonna undo those two modifications because I've gone ahead and set up this bicycle so that the pedals will match the dinosaur's feet. And so to select the entire thing I'll just press the v key to switch back to the black arrow tool. And you wanna kinda generally marquee around the pedals and that'll select everything. Or another way to work, I'll go ahead and click off those shapes to deselect them, is to move over to the layers panel, and click in the top right corner of that bike layer in order to select everything on that specific layer. Then go up to the edit menu and choose the copy command or you can press ctrl+c or cmd+c on the Mac. Alright now switch over to Photoshop where last week's composition is ready and waiting. And then I'll go up to the edit menu and choose the paste command or you can press ctrl+v or cmd+v on the Mac. And that'll bring up the paste dialogue box at which point you wanna make sure to select smart object so that you can monitor your transformations, that is to say, your scale, rotate, and numerical coordinate values. Unless you wanna add the bicycle to your library, turn this check box off. At which point, click okay and you will have this big bicycle sitting in the forest as if the trees are just a bunch of weeds. Alright now at this point you have the opportunity to apply your own custom scale, rotate, and numerical positioning values. I want to scale to bicycle proportionally and so I'll turn on this link value right here and then I'll change either the width or height value to 20% is gonna do us. And now I'll just go ahead and drag this guy upward and I'll accept my modification by pressing the enter key or the return key on the Mac. Alright now I'm gonna go ahead and zoom in on the bicycle and you can we've got a ton of detail here. Problem is that I wanna rotate it at an angle so that the bicycle appears to be rising in the sky, a la E.T. And so to regain access to those transformation values I'll go up to the edit menu and choose free transform or you can just press ctrl+t or cmd+t on the Mac. Notice because I'm working with the smart object that I can see that it is scaled to 20% and because it's a vector-based smart object I can change these values to anything I like including, for example, 200% although I would probably want to go ahead and scale the shape proportionally by clicking on this link icon. And now you can see if I drag around here that I've got all kinds of detail. Anyway, I wanna leave those guys set to 20% so I'll go and take that value down and then I'll go over here to the rotate value. Can't really see what I'm doing at this point because my bicycle is offscreen so I'll go ahead and drag him back into position here. And I'll once again zoom in. And you can rotate this guy by dragging outside the bounding box or I'll just go ahead and change this rotate value up here in the options bar to negative 13 is what I'm looking for and then I'll tab over to the x and y values which allow me to position the bicycle with a high degree accuracy. Make sure that the center point is selected inside this tiny reference point matrix on the far left side of the options bar. You also want to make sure this delta triangle right here is turned off. Then dial in an x-value of 1294, that is 1,294 pixels and then change the y-value to 1158 like so. And if I zoom out here you can see that that positions the bicycle pretty high inside the moon which is exactly what we want. At which point I'll press the enter key or the return key on the Mac a couple of times to apply that change and then I'll go ahead and rename this layer bike because, after all, that's what it is. Alright now let's bring in the tyrannosaur. So I'll just go ahead and switch back over to Illustrator and I'll switch to this document right here. Again it comes to us from the Dreamstime image library. I'll click on it with the black arrow tool to select it and then I'll press ctrl+c or cmd+c on a Mac to copy it. Now I'll switch back over to Photoshop and I'll press ctrl+v or cmd+v on a Mac to bring up the paste dialogue box. Now you go with the shape layer if you want. You'll get the same results. The problem is you won't be able to monitor previous transformations so instead of seeing 20% up there in the options bar, you would see 100% each time you begin scaling or rotating your artwork. So I'm gonna stick with smart object. That also allows me to just double-click a thumbnail in order to open my vector-based artwork inside Illustrator, make any modifications I like, and so forth. Anyway, I'm gonna go ahead and click okay in order to paste that guy as a smart object. He is once again way too big. He's also facing the wrong direction so I'll right click inside of him and choose flip horizontal like so. And then I'll just go ahead and drag a corner handle in order to scale this guy. I'm not really interested in scaling him proportionally and so I'll just drag the handles around and then drag outside the bounding box in order to rotate him. Now he's still way too big and at this point I'm just going to enter some numerical values. I'm gonna change the width value to 24%. Notice that the height value is negative and that implies that we're flipping him vertically even though we flipped him horizontally but whatever we need to keep that value negative and so I'll change that to negative 29.5% and then I'll tab over to the rotate value there and change it to negative 32 degrees. And now we need to move this guy into position and I want him to look like he's barely reaching the handlebars with his tiny little arms and that his feet are more or less on the pedals and that he's seated on the seat of the bicycle as well. And so the values that I came up with were an x-value of 1188 and then I'll tab over to the y-value and change it to 982. And by the way because the center point is selected inside that reference point matrix these values represent the coordinate position of the center point inside the transformation boundary as measured from the top left corner of the canvas. And you can see that we've got a pretty good match. Now this foot isn't quite on the pedal that's okay, might have slipped off, this one's looking very good and then of course his tiny little hands are just reaching the handlebars. At which point I'll press the enter key or the return key on a Mac in order to accept that change. Alright now just a couple of more changes. I'm going to go ahead and rename this layer T-Rex for obvious reasons and then I'm gonna zoom in right here and notice that the animal's toe or its claw or whatever this thing is, violates the space occupied by the bicycle's front rim. Or that is to say the rim for the front tire and so I need to mask this little detail away. I'm gonna do that by adding a pixel-based layer mask. And so I'll go ahead and click and hold on the rectangular marquee tool and select the elliptical marquee tool from the fly out menu and then I'll position my cursor at the center of that wheel like so. And I'll drag outward while pressing the alt key as well as the shift key. So I have both the shift and alt keys down here on a PC, that's gonna be shift+opt on a Mac, that way I'm centering a circle at that point. I'll go ahead and make it big enough so I'm selecting into the tire. Then I'll drop down to the add layer mask icon at the bottom of the layers panel and I'll alt or option click on it to mask that detail away. So if I shift+click in a layer mask to turn it off this is what I was seeing before so notice that claw right there and if I shift+click to turn the layer mask on I now see that the claw disappears. Now it should go just slightly into the wheel and if you wanna be that exact, then go ahead and position your cursor right there at the center once again, drag, press the shift+alt keys that's shift+opt on the Mac and keep those keys down until you create a selection like so. That selects the inside edge of the rim and then with the layer mask thumbnail selected here inside the layers panel, then note your foreground and background colors in my case the foreground color is white and the background color is black as by default. And so I'll fill this selection with white by alt+backspace here in the PC that's gonna be opt+delete on the Mac. And now you can see that the claw shows up ever so slightly behind that tire. If I were to unlink the object from its layer mask and then click on the object to select it and now I'll control or command drag it you can see that I'm moving the claw behind the tire which is exactly what I want. Now I was happy with the previous position so I'll just go ahead and press ctrl+z or cmd+z on the Mac to undo that change and I'll zoom out a bunch of times here and I'll go ahead and press shift+f in order to switch to the full screen mode, zoom out a little farther as well so that we can see the dinosaur and the trees and that is how you combine the best of E.T. along with Jurassic Park by creating a bicycle riding dinosaur using a combination of Illustrator and Photoshop. Alright now if you're a member of lynda.com/linkedinlearning I have a very special follow up movie in which I show you how to better integrate your vector-based smart objects against their photographic background using what I'm calling a universal glow. So if you take a close look here you can see that there's a very slight softening effect around the trees and that effect is white and cyan against the moon, deep blue against the sky, it always matches its background. And if this sounds a little rarefied, just know this, I've never demonstrated this before, I've never seen it demonstrated and it's massively useful. Deke's Techniques each and every week! Keep watching.

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