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Live Shapes and Transform Panel

Lesson 6 from: Intro to Adobe Illustrator

Jason Hoppe

Live Shapes and Transform Panel

Lesson 6 from: Intro to Adobe Illustrator

Jason Hoppe

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Lesson Info

6. Live Shapes and Transform Panel

Go beyond basic shape building: the transform panel offers what you need to create more complex shapes in vector art. What possibilities does a live shape offer? Which features can you toggle on or off? Watch Jason model shape transformation in real time.
Next Lesson: Drawing Lines

Lesson Info

Live Shapes and Transform Panel

we're gonna be using the properties panel, the transform panel that's in the properties panel here to go ahead and show you what's called live shapes. We showed you how to draw shapes and do corner widgets here. But there's a whole lot more things that we can do with shapes in here. That's pretty awesome. And so we're gonna use the transform panel and we're going to show you some of the cool things. Okay, And this is the transform panel resides in your properties panel, and we're going to show you that. So just some of the quick overview of what weaken dio We can go in and weaken set when we're drawing a circle or a square, we can edit these circles to create pie shapes. Yeah, really? We can draw polygons, change the number of sides here at the corners, and so let's jump right into that live shapes. So here I've got some basic shapes already drawn that we can use this as reference. So what's alive? Shape? Well, alive shape is simply a shape that is going to have attributes, that we can...

do a lot of stuff too. So if I go to my properties panel. It's like, Oh, I'm not really seeing much of my properties panel. Well, the reason why is because under the transform section, we have to click on the more options in order to get this. Okay, I wish they showed all of the transform section in here because it would be a whole lot more useful because there's so much hidden in the transform here that I'm actually going Teoh call up my actual transform window to show you these live objects. So I'm gonna take the transform section here, which is a which is the same thing here in the properties panel. It just shows everything. So with this, I'm going to you select my circle, and I can control the size and the width and the height here, and I can rotate this. But here's the cool thing. This little handle that sticks out of the circle. I called little Walker Walker handle for those of you that were in the eighties. And you know that reference right there. I can take this handle, and I can open this up to create a pie shape. Now, here in my transform panel, Aiken set those angles right here for the pie shape, which is actually pretty awesome. Now, here's the crazy part. If you never knew this, this is something that's absolutely awesome. You want to do a quick little pie chart, and if somebody is like, OK, I want you to show 65%. I'm gonna show you the coolest thing right here. When we're dealing with percentage, we have 0 to 100. We're dealing with a circle. We have 360 degrees. So if I want a 65% pie chart, I'm gonna type in 65 times 3.6. Every percentage is 3.6 degrees. And, yes, all these fields could do math. I know, and I can go ahead and I can show you what the remaining part of a 65% pie shape is. Now. You're like, Oh, my gosh, I want both these shapes. Well, we have a little flip shape right here, which allows us to invert rpai so we can show half of this or the 65% in the 35%. Yeah, pretty awesome. Live shapes. I know. It's awesome. We're gonna jump over to our next shape here, which is gonna be our rounded rectangle here in the transform panel. If you don't want to edit your corner widgets right here, you can use them in the transform panel by default. This link is active, which means when I change the size of any of my corners, they all change simultaneously. Liken unlinked that. And I can then change the corners for one side only. And I can control the size and the style of each and every individual corner here. If I want no corner, no rounded or inverse corner would like to return that to a square corner. I simply set that setting to zero and then I have the basic corner. So yeah, I could do a lot of cool stuff in here. I could go in and I could make it look like a little vessel or a cup right there just by rounding those corners again. Transform panel. This is all live shapes by polygon. Now, I was able to edit the polygon with a little triangle here on the sides. But I can also do it in my life shape here where I can simply roll up the number of sides right here. And then I can resize it with the two different radius. Is here quick and easy. Way to change the size of something. If I want to make it different, I don't have to highlight the number and then type in something new. Put your cursor in there and just use your up arrow or down arrow on your keyboard. And that allows you to change that value. You don't have to type it in highlighted. Delete it now, don't bother. Put it in there. Awesome. Okay. Gonna go back, Teoh our rectangle here, and we have our rotate sections that we can do here as well. But here's what I wanted to show you in this particular regard. This shape right here that I have has both a fill in a stroke on it. Now, if I were to go ahead and I were to scale this up or down in size, I could make this larger, smaller, taking the selection tool and pulling on the pull handles, and I could scale my entire object. Now the stroke weight on this has not gone up in size. Sometimes if I scale these objects larger, I do want the stroke to scale with it. I can turn on this scale, stroke and effects, which means I scale something larger, smaller. The stroke will scale larger and smaller with it. The larger I make it, the larger the stroke gets smaller. I make it the strollers, Muller, the stroke gets. I may want that. I may not. So this is something you can turn right on and write off in the scale corners here. The other thing that I want to show you is this. I'm going to pull my corner widgets in, and I'm going to go in and turn this into a little pill shaped by pulling my corner widgets all the way in. Now, as I make this larger, you'll see that it no longer remains that pill shape. And it's like, Yeah, but that's what I wanted. Okay, transform panel, scale the corners. Do you want to keep the look of the corners the same? Or do you want to keep the corner radius? The same If I scale the corners here at night, choose scale corners, I will get larger pill shape no matter what size I make this so smaller and larger If I do not scale my corners and I do this, I lose my pill shape. But when I come back down to make it a smaller here, I can't make it any smaller than my original corner. You see how I try to make that smaller and I can't go past that. That may be something you run into. That's the scale corners feature here. Do you want to make it look the same, or do you want to keep the corner radius the same? Choose the scale corners or not well, with our triangle tool here again, we can go in and set the number of sides, and this is where we can go in and set our angle of rotation as well. We can also skew our objects or sheer them so we can keep them on their baseline and we can share them off one way or another. Using our sheer so kind of cool with what Weaken Dio with that sheer all live shapes and life shapes is just something you can get in and use. Select them and then actively at it. Those properties right there in the transform panel it is in the Properties panel, but you got to click on little dot, dot, dot for more options to get the complete section here. That's why I use the transform panel.

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Ratings and Reviews

Pattianne Pascual
 

This is magnificent! What a beautiful gift. I am 56 and always learning. This free class inspired me even more. I will be telling everyone about creative live,sharing and urging others to buy some of these great classes and bundles. Thank you so very much,again and again.i look forward to taking classes on a regular basis.

Sherrie Alexander
 

Jason was super knowledgeable, made working in illustrator fun and simplified . Love his easy to follow instructions. As we all know starting up in illustrator can be overwhelming. Thank you so much I needed this!

a Creativelive Student
 

Great job, several ah ha moments and throw in a few wow's. I thought I had better than a basic knowledge only to find out how little I really knew. The short cuts, shapes and highlight noodles just to name a few. Well worth it. This would have made learning AI so much easier than when I did. Thank you Jason,

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