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

924 Turning a triangle into a Mercedes star

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

924 Turning a triangle into a Mercedes star

- [Deke] In this movie, I'll show you how to take our three part equilateral triangle and turn it into something more closely resembling the Mercedes star. Now I'm not saying this is a faithful depiction. In fact, I've taken special care to make sure that it's not, this is just by way of a fun project. All right. So I'll go ahead and switch over to our documents so far, and I'll select this bottom shape by clicking on it with the black arrow tool. Now notice that we have a fairly golden looking object and I've set the color for my layer to gold as well, which means my anchor points aren't going to show up very well. So I'll go ahead and double click on that triangle layer here inside the layers panel and I'll change its color to, let's say violet should show up well, and then I'll click okay. All right. Now turn on the guidance layer so that we can see our center guides in particular. And now I want to add a point at this exact location down here, and you can do that using the pen tool, which you can get by pressing the P key. Then just go ahead and hover over the intersection of that bottom segment and the vertical guideline. And you'll see a plus sign next to the cursor at which point go ahead and click in order to create a point. And now what I want to do is move that point 60 points upward and the easiest way to do that that is to switch back to the black arrow tool by pressing the V key, and then I'll press the enter key or the return key on the Mac to bring up the move dialog box. And I'll make sure that the horizontal value is set to zero. And then I'll tab to the vertical value and set it to negative 60. And the reason I'm going with negative 60 is because I want to move that point up 60 points as we're seeing right here, at which point I'll go ahead and click okay in order to accept that change. Now that's easy enough where that particular point is concerned, but the other shapes are a little tougher. How do I know where to put the new points for one thing? And by what angle do I measure them? Well, there's a lot of ways to figure that out, but I'm going to show you my favorite, which is to undo that last modification by pressing control Z or command Z on the Mac. And then I'll go ahead and switch to my line segment tool, which is available here inside the line tool fly out menu. And then I'll just go ahead and drag from the intersection of those two center guides down to that new bottom point, and you should see in your heads up display, you can barely make it out there, that I have a D value distance of a hundred points, and I'm creating this line at 270 degrees. And I just want to confirm that by clicking with this tool, just so you can really see those values. And so bear that in mind, 100 points is the distance. And that's going to be 100 points whether we're going from the center to this bottom segment or from the center to the right side or left side. All right. So I'll just go ahead and cancel out of here. Just want you to note that because it's going to become important in just a moment. All right, now we want to rotate that new line by switching to the rotate tool, which you can get by pressing the R key and then you want to alt or option click on the top point right there in order to bring up the rotate dialog box. And you should set the angle to 360, which is a full circle divided by three because after all, we want three segments, which is going to give you an angle of 120 degrees, at which point, go ahead and click the copy button. Now press control D or command D on the Mac in order to copy that segment once again. All right, now I'm going to draw one more line as a kind of indicator. And so I'll go ahead and grab the line segment tool right there, and I'll move my cursor down here to the bottom point. And I will click in order to bring up this dialogue box. I'll change the length value to 20 points, and I'll set the angle to zero and then I'll press the enter key or the return key on the Mac to create that tiny line right there. And now just so you and I are on the same page, go ahead and press control K or command key on a Mac, the K being for keyboard increment so that you can check that it's set to its default of one point, in which case, just go ahead and click okay. And press shift left arrow in order to scoot that 20 point line over 10 points. So it's nice and centered and then press shift up arrow one, two, three, four, five, six times to indicate that desired 60 point move. All right, now I'll press the V key to switch back to my black arrow tool. And I'll shift click on these two lines. This guy right here and this one as well. And now we want to turn them into custom guides by first moving them to the guidance layer, which you can do here inside the layers panel by dragging that purple square in this case down until it turns blue. And that will move those lines onto the proper layer. Now right click anywhere inside the document window and choose make guides to turn them into snapping guides like so. All right, now I'll go ahead and click on this left shape right here in order to select it. And I'll add an anchor point at this location right here by switching to the pen tool, which again, you can get by pressing the P key, and then you just want to hover your cursor right there. Make sure your smart guides are turned on. In which case you should see that tiny magenta word intersect. You should also see a plus sign next to your cursor at which point go ahead and click in order to add a point. Now press the control key or the command key on the Mac to temporarily gain access to the white arrow tool, and then click on this right shape to select it. Go ahead and release the control key or the command key on the Mac and click at this location right here in order to add another anchor point. Now that we have all the anchor points exactly where we want them press the A key to switch to the white arrow tool. Notice this new anchor point is selected. We want to add the other ones by shift marqueeing around this guy like so, and then you might as well shift marquee around the bottom one. Now that's actually going to select two points because we've got that black line on top. That's going to work out just fine. Now we can't just set in moving these points, for example, if I press shift up arrow, I'm going to nudge all of the points upward 10 points, which is not what I want at all. Instead, I want to bring them all closer to the center and you can do that by first undoing that modification and then switching to the scale tool, which you can get by pressing the S key. Now notice that by default, Illustrator is placing that target shape origin a little bit low, actually quite a bit low, below the center of gravity. And that's because it's representing the center of a rectangular bounding box. That's not what we want at all. Instead, you want to position your cursor at the intersection of those two center guides. So you're right at the middle of those selected anchor points and then press the alt key or the option key on the Mac and click to bring up the scale dialog box. Now by default, the uniform value is probably going to be set to 100, something like that. But think about it this way. This area right here, this distance is 100 points. Whether we're talking from the bottom point to the center or this right-hand point to the center or the left point to the center, and a reason I'm making a big deal out of that is because 100 points with 100% is really easy math. 1% is going to equal one point. So if we want to move things inward 60 points, then we need to click after that 100% value and enter minus 60 because 60% is going to translate to 60 points at which point press the tab key, and assuming that your preview checkbox is turned on, you'll see this effect right here. Then click okay in order to accept that effect. And notice right there that the point, this anchor point, this bottom one has moved to the tick mark that I drew and converted to a custom guide. All right, now these big thick strokes are a little bit much for me. So I'm going to press the V key to switch back to my black arrow tool, and then I'll press control A or command A on the Mac to select all of the paths. And I'll go up here to the horizontal control panel and I'll change this line weight value to one point like so, and then I'll press the enter key or the return key on the Mac to accept that change. All right, now click off the paths for a moment. I don't need these guys anymore, so I'll go ahead and turn off the guidance layer. And now I'll select that one remaining short path, that vertical guy right there. And let's go ahead and duplicate it once again, by switching to the rotate tool, which you can get by pressing the R key. And I'll go ahead and alt or option click on the top anchor point in order to bring up the rotate dialog box complete with the last applied angle value, which is exactly what I want. So I'll go ahead and click copy, and then I'll press control D or command D on the Mac in order to duplicate that line once again, and then I'll press the V key to switch back to my black arrow tool. And I will click it an empty portion of the document in order to de-select my artwork. And that is how you transform a humble, equilateral triangle into a kind of Mercedes star, which by the way, represents the company's dominance in land, sea, and air. In the next movie, I'll show you how to create the ring.

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