From the course: Illustrator One-on-One: Mastery

Introduction to the three kinds of 3D in Illustrator - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator One-on-One: Mastery

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Introduction to the three kinds of 3D in Illustrator

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- [Instructor] In this movie, I'll introduce you to the three kinds of 3D that are available to you inside Illustrator, specifically Rotate, Extrude and Bevel and Revolve. And so let's start off by selecting these notes right here, and then I'll go up to the effect menu, choose 3D and choose the simplest of the functions, which is Rotate. Now notice when you first enter one of these dialog boxes, the preview checkbox is going to be turned off and that's just to save some processing time, but you're going to need to turn that checkbox on to see what you're doing. Now, you can rotate this 2D object in 3D space, by dragging one of the edges of this cube and notice as I drag this bottom edge, for example, I'm tilting the notes backward. Now, I want you to notice a couple of things here, first, this is a dynamic effect, so we're not actually modifying the original path outlines. We're just changing an image of that path on the fly. Secondly, we're seeing what's known as an axonometric projection, which is to say any parallel lines in the notes, whether it's these bars up here at the top of the 16th notes or these vertical stems, they're all going to remain parallel, and so, in other words, we have no perspective. However, you can add perspective using this perspective option right here and to do so, all you need to do is click on that right pointing arrow head, and then just drag this ball in order to add some perspective to the effect. And so, as you can now see, the parallel lines are no longer drawn in a parallel fashion. And as a result, the notes appear to be heading toward us. Now I could bring the notes up over on the left-hand side, so that we can see them all clearly inside the document window, by dragging the left-hand edge of this cube. And then assuming I like what I see, I'll just go ahead and click Okay in order to accept that change. Now I want you to notice something else, let me see if I can bring it back. You may find that every once in a while you see outlines around the effect, in which case, just go ahead and click Okay, and those outlines will disappear. Now while this rotate effect is interesting, it's not really a true 3D effect because we're not seeing any depth. If you want to add some depth, then you want to choose the Extrude and Bevel command instead. And so I'm going to switch over to the Appearance panel and I'll turn off 3D Rotate. And so notice that it is a dynamic effect, meaning that if you ever wanted to change it, you would just click on the words 3D Rotate, here inside the Appearance panel, but I want to apply a different kind of 3D by going up to the effect menu, once again choosing 3D and this time choosing Extrude and Bevel. Now, if you're working along with me and Illustrator asks you, if you want to apply a new effect, go ahead and click on that button in order to bring up the 3D Extrude and Bevel options. And notice once again, we've got that cube. And so I could drag that bottom edge up. If I want to see what I'm doing, however, I need to turn on the preview checkbox, at which point notice, in addition to the fact that I am rotating my notes in 3D space, I'm also seeing these beveled edges. And so in other words, we have depth. All right, I'm going to go ahead and drag this edge upward a little bit. Once again, we're seeing that axonometric projection, meaning that all the parallel lines remain parallel, if you want to change that, then you can increase the perspective value like so, and again, if you end up with these wire frame edges, all you have to do is click Okay, in order to watch them disappear. All right, now let's check out the final effect, which is known as 3D Revolve. I'm going to go ahead and switch back to the Layers panel here and turn off the 3D Extrude layer, and then turn on 3D Revolve, which as you can see is a bunch of shapes carved into a half circle. Now, the idea behind 3D Revolve is that you are revolving the paths around a common axis, and as a result, we'll be able to take this half circle and turn it into a sphere. And so I'll go ahead and click on any one of these paths to select all of them, because I've gone ahead and grouped them together in advance, and now I'll go up to the Effect menu, choose 3D and choose Revolve, and then I'll go in and turn on the preview checkbox so we can see all of those paths revolved around the vertical axis, in order to convert what was formerly a kind of half circle into a sphere. And again, if you want to rotate that object around, then you can drag on the cube, at which point you're going to see, in our case, this wire frame globe. All right so I'll go ahead and drag it down to here let's say, you can add some perspective if you like, although it may not ultimately be as compelling as what we saw with Extrude and Bevel, but certainly we are adding perspective to the effect, at which point I'll go ahead and click Okay to accept that change. All right now, because this is a dynamic effect, I can modify the shapes to my heart's content and the effect will update on the fly. So for example, I'm going to press the A key to switch to the white arrow tool, then I'll click off the shapes to de-select them, and I'll try to find one of the dark shapes, such as this guy right there, and then I'll go up here to the right side of the control panel and click on the Select Similar Objects icon, to select all of the dark stripes, and I'll go ahead and change them to the shade of green, let's say, and then I'll click on one of the white stripes, it's a little bit hard to find, but this guy right here is a representative, and then I'll go ahead and click on this Select Similar Objects icon once again, and this time I will select a light shade of green and just like that without any waiting whatsoever, Illustrator goes ahead and updates the 3D object. And then if I want to change the angle of the sphere, I press the V key to switch back to my black arrow tool, I click on any one of these shapes in order to select the entire group. I switch back over to the Appearance panel and click on the words 3D Revolve. Now this can be a little confusing, the fact that Illustrator immediately turns off that preview once again, so you'll need to turn it on in order to see the shape that we had a moment ago, and then you can go ahead and drag this cube in order to rotate this sphere to any angle you like. And I might go ahead and drag it around as well and move this bottom edge upward just a little bit. And then assuming I like what I see, I'd go ahead and click Okay in order to accept that change. And so those are your three varieties of 3D inside Illustrator. You have Rotate, which allows you to rotate a 2D object in 3D space. You have Extrude and Bevel, which allows you to add depth. And then you've got Revolve, which allows you to revolve an object around a common axis in order to create a volume metric and nicely lit form.

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