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

906 Rotating with precision accuracy

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

906 Rotating with precision accuracy

- [Instructor] In this movie, we're going to scale and duplicate our pool queue in order to create these hour and minute hands, and then we're going to very precisely rotate those hands to represent a specific time, in this case 353. All right, so I'll go ahead and switch over to our document in progress here, and I'll turn on the Guides layer so that we can see those center guides, and then I'll go ahead and select this stick just by marqueeing it with the Black Arrow Tool. And I'll switch to the Rotate Tool, which you can get by pressing the R key. All right, now you want to go to the View menu and make sure your Smart Guides are turned on. If you're seeing a check mark in front of the command, then you're good. And then you want to move your cursor over the intersection of those two center guides, and Alt or Option + click to force the display of the rotate dialog box, at which point I'll change the angle value to 90 degrees. And with the Preview checkbox turned on, you can see that gives us a vertical pool view, at which point, click the Copy button in order to create a copy of that object. Then, switch back to the Black Arrow Tool by pressing the V key, and click on that original object, you're probably going to have to click on its outline in order to select it. That's why I oftentimes just go ahead and marquee objects that contain clipping masks, as in this case here. All right, now you want to select the Scale Tool, which you can get by pressing the S key, and then Alt or Option + click, once again at the intersection of those two center guides, try to be as careful as possible. And then we're looking for a non-uniform scale, and I came up with a horizontal value of 62%. We're going to leave the vertical value set to 100%, at which point, click the OK button this time around as opposed to Copy. All right, now I'm going to bring back my Balls layer, and then I'll press Control + Shift + A, or Command + Shift + A on a Mac, in order to de-select the objects. And I'll go ahead and zoom out a little bit here. Now, this would be all we need if we wanted to set the time to exactly three o'clock. Because notice, the shorter hour hand is pointing at the three ball, and the longer minute hand is pointing at 12. However, I want to set my clock, if only for the sake of demonstration, to 3:53, you can change it to anything you like. And to do that, go ahead and make a duplicate of the Sticks layer, and that way you could go back and change it to a different time, if you want to. By clicking on this fly out menu icon in the top right corner of the layers panel and choosing Duplicate Sticks. Then turn off the original Sticks layer and go ahead and double click on the name for the new one and change it to Hands, and then press the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac. All right, now press the V key in order to switch back to the Black Arrow Tool, and marquee that minute hand in order to select it, and then go ahead and zoom in on it by pressing Control + plus or Command + plus on the Mac. And I'm going to scroll down so I can see the bottom of the stick. And then, I will once again select the Rotate Tool, which again, you can get by pressing the R key. And I'll move my cursor to the intersection of those two guidelines, and I'll Alt or Option + click. Now the idea is that we want to rotate the minute hand 53 minutes in a clockwise direction. And so the first thing we need to do is translate minutes into degrees here in the rotate dialog box. So I'm going to enter 360 degrees, which describes an entire circle, and divide it by 60 minutes, like so. And then I'll press the Tab key, and we come up with an angle of six degrees. Notice, however, that we're rotating that minute hand in a counterclockwise direction. If we want clockwise instead, we need to change that value to negative six degrees. At which point we've now rotated the minute hand one minute in a clockwise direction. We really want 53 minutes, and so I'll go ahead and enter asterisk after the value, 53. Now if you want some other number of minutes, then you would enter those minutes instead of 53. However, 53 is what I'm looking for. And so I'll press the Tab key. That comes out to negative 318 degrees. Who cares, it just happens to be right. At which point I'll click OK in order to accept that change. And now if I press Control + Shift + A or Command + Shift + A on a Mac in order to deselect the artwork. And I press Control + zero or Command + zero to zoom out, you can see that this minute hand is exactly at 53 degrees where this clock is concerned. All right, now the hour hand takes a little more effort. We need to rotate it 53 increments between three and four o'clock right here. And so I'll press the B key to switch back to my Black Arrow Tool. I'll marquee that hour hand like so. And now, I'm going to zoom in pretty tight. I still want to be able to see the three and four balls here. And so I'll go ahead and switch back to the Rotate Tool, and then I'll Alt or Option + click at the intersection of those two guidelines. Don't worry if something ends up getting highlighted on screen, just make sure you Alt or Option + click at the intersection. And now what we need to do is figure out the distance from three to four o'clock. So we'll take 360 degrees, and this time we'll divide it by 12, that's 30 degrees. However, because it's a positive value, we're rotating the hand in the counterclockwise direction. That's just the way things work in Illustrator. If you want to rotate it in the clockwise direction, then change that value to negative, like so, and you can see that I have successfully rotated that hour hand from three o'clock all the way to four o'clock. Don't really want to go that far, I just want to go 53/60 of that distance. And so the first thing I'm going to do is click after this value and enter /60 to divide it by 60 increments. So 60 minutes, which gives me negative 0.5 degrees, which rotates that hour hand one minute from three o'clock to four o'clock. And now, I'll go ahead and click after that value and enter *53. Again, if you want some other time, you would enter those minutes right there, and then press the Tab key. That translates to an angle value of negative 26.5 degrees. Again, doesn't matter. It's just what it is at which point, I'll click OK to accept that change. Then I'll de-select my artwork by pressing Control + Shift + A or Command + Shift + A on the Mac. And you can see if I zoom out, that we are accurately representing an analog time of 3:53, whether it's 3:53 in the morning, unlikely that the pool hall's going to be open then, or 353 in the afternoon. All right, I'm going to turn off the Guides layer, and now what I want to do is copy that drop shadow from the Balls layer to the Hands layer. Notice these circular targets right here, they're known as meatballs internally at Adobe. This guy is hollow, the one for hands. And this guy right here is filled. That tells you, the filled item right there, tells you that there is a dynamic effect assigned to that layer, which is the drop shadow. If you wanted to move that dynamic effect to the hands layer, you would just drag it, like so. But that would turn off the drop shadow for the balls, that's not what we want. So instead, we'll go ahead and undo that change by pressing Control + Z or Command + Z on the Mac, and I will Alt or Option + drag that guy. Notice that I'm seeing a little plus sign next to my cursor. And now if I release, I go ahead and copy the drop shadow like so. And that is how you apply precision rotations using very basic math here inside Illustrator.

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