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

887 Rendering the 3D star in heavy metal

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

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887 Rendering the 3D star in heavy metal

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- [Instructor] In this movie, we're going to take our 3D twisted woven metal star. And we're going to render it an absolute heavy metal here inside illustrator, which is ultimately a combination of scaling the star and assigning some new gradients. All right, so I'll go ahead and switch over to the graphics so far. And I'm going to make a copy of this star layer by clicking on the Flyout menu icon in the top right corner of the Layers panel and choosing Duplicate Star. And that'll just go ahead and protect the original. Now I'll turn the original off, and I'll go ahead and double-click on an empty portion of this layer, to bring up the Layer Options dialog box. And we'll change the name of this layer to 132%, 108% is what I'm looking for. That's because that is exactly how we are going to scale this shape. And then I will change the color, to let's say gold and click Okay. All right, now you want to go ahead and bring back your circle guides layer down here at the bottom of the stack, and then press Control + A or Command + A on a Mac, in order to select all of your artwork, and now go ahead and select the Scale tool, which you can get by pressing the S key. And what you want to do is move your cursor to the intersection of those two guidelines, the two center guides that is, and then Alt or Option click, in order to bring up the Scale dialog box, and go ahead and change the uniform value to 132% like so. And then click Okay. And notice that goes ahead and scales the star, so it fills the outer circle. All right, now what you want to do is press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac once again, and click at the intersection of the vertical guideline and the outermost circle right there. In order to once again bring up the scale dialog box. And this time, set the uniform value to 108% and click Okay. And in case this isn't an obvious, I figured these values out, through trial and error. All right, now I'm going to press V key to switch to my black arrow tool, and I'll go up to the Window menu and choose the Gradient command in order to bring up the Gradient panel, as we're seeing right here. Now, we're not seeing the colors inside the gradient. And that's because the gradients are set to different angles. So what I'm going to do is click off the shapes to deselect them, and I'll click on this shape to select it. And now what you want to do if you're working in the most recent version of Illustrator, is go up here to the Control Panel. And notice this option right here, Start editing similar shapes together, go ahead and click on it. And that will select all the shapes that have the same gradients, with the same angle value of 36 degrees. And now I want to replace this dark gray with black, by grabbing this guy right here, the color swatch in which the RGB values are all zero. And go ahead and drag it and drop it to the very first color stop. All right, now click off the shapes to deselect them, and I'll select this guy instead the half an arrowhead, and I'll go ahead and click on that icon once again up here in the Control Panel. And notice this time around the angle value is set to negative 90 degrees. And I'll go ahead and grab that black swatch right there. And I'll drag it and drop it on the first color stop in order to create this dramatic effect here. Now, if things are looking a little bluish, that's just a function of that Global Edits feature right there. And so notice as soon as I click off the shapes, that everything looks absolutely black and white. Now notice down here in the Layers panel that my layer is twirled open, so that I can see all of the path outlines, don't really want that. So I'll go ahead and twirl it close like so. And then I'll click on the inner guides layer, and I'll create a new layer on top of it by Alt or Option clicking, on the little page icon at the bottom of the Layers panel. And I'm going to call this layer radial, because we're going to create a rectangle and fill it with a radial gradient. And I'll just change the color to orange. Let's say these colors are entirely up to you by the way. All right now I'll zoom out so that I can see the entire red bleed boundary right there. And I'll go ahead and switch to the Rectangle Tool here in the shape tool flyout menu. Assuming that your Smart Guides are turned on, and incidentally, Smart Guides are located here under the View menu, so just make sure you're seeing a check mark in front of Smart Guides. And then drag from one corner of the red bleed boundary to the other like so, in order to create a big rectangle, now, I don't want it to have a stroke. So I'll click on the second color swatch on the far left side of the Control Panel, and I'll change it to none. And then just make sure that your fill is active here inside the Gradient Panel and switch the style from Linear Gradient to Radial like so. And I actually want to swap the black and white color stops. So we'll click on this icon right here to reverse the gradient like so. Now problem is that the interior of the star is appearing white, I want it to be black. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go ahead and take this first color stop right here, and I'm going to change its location value to 20% like so. And then I'm going to make a copy of this black color stop by Alt or option dragging it. Now if I take it all the way to the beginning, notice that we have a sort of grayish gradient effect at the center of that star. And it'll become all the more obvious, if I go ahead and turn off the circle guides layer down here at the bottom of the stack. I want this guy to be absolutely jet-black. Now, you could edit the gradient using the gradient tool if you want to, in order to move it center around, but there's a much easier way to work here, which is to make sure this first black color stop is selected and then change its location value to 10%. And that will just go ahead and scoot it over, so the center is absolutely black like so. And now I'll press Control + Shift + A or Command + Shift + A on the Mac to deselect that rectangle. And that is how you take that twisted woven 3D star and make it absolutely heavy metal here inside Illustrator.

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