Lessons

Lesson Info

Shape Builder Tool with Q&A

That's how to use the Pathfinder tool. And I like those but a couple versions back. They introduced the shape builder tool, and I like the shape builder tool because it's just it's a lot more visual again if I can see it as a pattern. The fact that illustrator can see it as a pattern just kind of kind of blows my mind that you could do that, you know, because you're so used to going well, I see it like if you're a photo shop, I see the foreground versus the background. Why can't Photoshopped? Well, it's getting to the point where it can actually do some amazing things like that as well. So I like that with Illustrator. If I see something as a shape, then it sees something as a shape. So I'm just going to take that same let's take a on the lips and make that. Actually, I don't like that it wasn't completely round. We're going to try that again, and I'm just gonna go ahead and create some other shapes on top of it. And let's say these were actually different colors already. All right, so...

we can actually change the Phil Let's change the stroke to non. Let's change the fill to a separate color, right? So we want to change that for both of them. They're all different colors, but I want those to be actually one shape. I don't want just these two things here. Maybe when we were making a teddy bear, right? We want to go ahead and put the ears on that. We wanted to be all one shape. Well, can you imagine trying to draw that shape with the pen tool? I'm gonna try and draw a circle, which first of all, I have never been able to dio And then I'm going to try and make those years. I don't even understand how I would be doing this, right. This is not looking very good. This is called Erica Freehand drawing. Right? So I this is what might Well, he looks kind of a pig. I'm actually kind of. If I was trying to drop big, I'd be really impressed. But I wasn't try and draw that, but, I mean, you can see how long I would I would never be able to draw perfect circles like that. So I make the shapes and think. OK, but now I wanted to be one piece. I don't just grouping together. I wanted to be when I make an outline. So if I group these and then give it a stroke Well, each one is individually outline. That's not what I was trying for. I wanted to be just outlining the very, very outer. Most part of that drawing is gonna make this little bit thicker, so you can see it. So what I wanted instead of that I'm going to take this and I don't want these to be grouped at all. I don't have a group that came and I wanted to be one shape. I don't want this thick line to be showing. I just want the outline to be along the outside. So what I can do is select all the shapes that I have and use the shape builder tool. That tool lives over here. And it's this little thing looks kind of clouds with dashes through it. But what it is, click that you have to select all the shapes we wanna work within this tool. And then as I roll over each piece, you notice it highlights it and I think. Okay, I could see that is to separate items now It's not. It's just that it knows that other item is back there. So it's creating that intersection, and what the tool lets me do is just drag across. And I'm just gonna come into this item. And now all three of those are exactly the same shape that's there. Now it took the one that's on top. So the color that's on top is always gonna be the one controlling that. But I also want this one to be part of it, So I'm just gonna click and drag all the way through. So now I have that nice silhouette shape that I wanted. And now when I worked with that, that's exactly one path I could use the direct selection tool to play with the life corners or the actual anchors and points or anything like that and play without Let's pull that out, see if I could move. It's not gonna move it. All right, play with that. Sure, I can come in here, grab that point, make whatever changes I need to from that. But it created one compound shaped like that. Actually, I'm gonna I'm gonna back up through all of that really quickly till I have those individual items. The other thing that I can do is I can select all those items, go back to that shape builder tool. I can hold on the option or the old key and get rid of certain shapes. I could just click once on that shape and it gets rid of that piece that's there been undo it. If I hold down the option key and drag through those two, it actually just chops that out. So again, thinking in those shape terms again, how would I have gotten this notch cut out of this? I couldn't do it, but I can place another item on top of it and say, Cut those out. So now I'm holding on the option key again, or the old key and dragging across thes two items only and click those out like that. So to be able to create a shape like that that I couldn't have done on my own again, it's just going back to thinking, What does that shape look like? We could try something with. Let's try with the lips tool and a star on top of that. And let's put a star say over here So again I can grab that So just barely fits into both of those, right? So I can select both of those. Use the shape builder tool. And maybe I just want to cut that out, make this one piece or drag this across. Or maybe I wanted to get rid of just that little part. Hold on the option key and get rid of that little notch that's there and that little notch that's there again. I just want to take out a small little portion of that by using those other shapes that air there. I think the shape builder tool is super cool. I just love it. I'll just throw shapes on a page and start just subtracting or adding, just to see what kind of crazy thing I could get. And it gives you that real randomness to it. Yet it still has formed, so if you started with that nice round circle, you still got that circle underneath there. But then you can start just making jagged edges, but overall, when you see it, you can see that there's that nice shape That's still kind of the the foundation of that original piece. All right. I like the shape builder, Tool. Frankly, has just kind of my thing. Love it. Question. Yeah. Yeah. Quick question. From Nathan for you, Erica. When creating a mask, is there a way to preserve the fill of the masks shape? So that does not become invisible. A mask, like lower doing images and masks we haven't done. When I think when you were, like, creating the moon. Okay. See what you've moved away. No, that's the whole point of that. Yeah, is that it? Does that you could do. You could probably do the divide one, because the divide one keeps all the elements and it's there. And then you could make it white or whatever on top of it. Maybe do divide, because if you divide it, it's gonna cut it up. But you don't. It doesn't look any different until you start changing the effects of it. Perfect. And that's actually what Ceresa in the chat room suggested. So excellent. You concur Were on the same page of that are way. All right. Did you have another one to know that right now? Thanks sure. I'm gonna open up this one here. Those previewing mostly had I'm just going to steal this item that I wanted here, and I'll paste that in there. So I just copied it from one item, one page and put it in the other. Let's grab this and I want to hold down the shift key. So I get a nice, constrained proportions there and I want to talk about the appearance panel. So I talked about that and how how we can have multiple strokes and things on her. And that's exactly what I have on this particular item. So again, going back to the outline, basically, the skeleton is a big circle. That's all it is. And then I've said, Hey, I'd like the Phil toe look like this. I'd like the stroke toe look like this. And if you notice it shows Fillon stroke, it says it's a blue Phil with a brown stroke. Well, if I turn the preview back on, it kind of looks like that, but there's kind of more to it. Well, this is all one object. This is not to objects. We saw that in the outline of the ally mode we saw. It's one circle. Well, how did I get more than one Phil, look on there. That's in the appearance panel, which is this little item here. And if some of your panels aren't open, remember, most of live under the window menu. So it coming here and open up the appearance panel and I'm going to just pull that off. So it's floating here. We can see all of it, and I'm going to zoom out just ever so slightly, some doing space and command to do that. And I can see that I have a fill a blue Phil and there's my brown stroke, just like it shows off in the tool panel. But up here, it says, I also have another stroke, so I have two strokes on top of that. Well, that's because you can have multiple fills in multiple strokes on any item. I can keep adding strokes if I want a swell. So let's actually, I'm gonna hit the little eyeball icon next to that stroke, the yellow stroke, and get rid of it. That's what I'd expect to find when I look at this and say, OK, this item is ah, blue fill with a brown stroke. Let's come back to a stroke here, and so that's great. That's what I expected to look like. But what I did is I said, let's add another stroke on top of that. So this is something we've created a bunch of fill stroke item. Let's add another stroke. So I come down to the bottom here, the appearance paddle Aiken say, add new stroke or add new Phil. So I'm gonna add a new stroke, and it adds it on top of the current stroke that it's on. So every time I add something, it's gonna add it to the top. Now you notice it didn't add it to the very top because this one's hidden. So it's gonna work and kind of keep all our unhindered ones, the visible ones down together. So it added a stroke. All right, so I'm actually gonna undo that because I don't get too many strokes going here. So what it did, let's pretend we just added this stroke here and it looked OK, I'm gonna back up. I'm going to leave that. I think that's confusing having it already in there. All right, so this is what? I created a stroke in a film, right? So I've given it a 25 point stroke on a fill of this blue. I'm gonna add another stroke on top of it, so I'm gonna click. New stroke automatically throws its top and makes it look like the other stroke. So it looks exactly the same, so you can't see anything yet. It's 25 point brown stroke on top of the other one. Well, the first thing I want to do is change the color. So let's change the color to that brighter yellow. Well, now I can't see the brown stroke because it's exactly the same. Thickness is the other one. So I need to make this thinner, so I'm just gonna go ahead and make this thinner. So now I can see that I've got two strokes on top of their same item, and the reason that's important is if I want to change the size. I don't want to be trying to maintain three different circles that I'll have to be exactly the same. I want them to be the same, and I can go ahead in any of the time. Anytime you see that the menu items are blue and underlined. It means you can click on that and get to the menu available for that particular item. So if I click on stroke here, I now have the strokes panel, which I'm used to seeing over here. It pops up right here, and this is where I tell it. The stroke attributes so again I could do things like arrowheads, which isn't gonna make any difference in a circle. But the one thing I can do is say, Let's make it a dash flying Somebody could make that dash line. I've got that 16.8 point gap, and I like the way that looks. And I want to make it maybe a little bit thicker all over night. So just make this. Make that 10 point, we'll say Okay, so now I have that extra stroke that's on there. But the nice thing is, with this, I can turn that stroke on her off. I could turn any of that stuff on her off, so I have it there. It's still my basic circle, but with these attributes that are live, which means I can turn them on and off. So if I decide I really don't ever want that stroke, but maybe I want it. I don't want to get rid of it yet. I don't have to redo it. I could just turn it off and then work with this for a while. Maybe I just don't have all those extra, all those extra attributes in my way. And I just want to be working with this and getting everything position. Maybe I've got text to go inside and I want to work with that. At the last minute, I can come back and turn that on. The other thing I could do is I can play with individual capacities on there so I can play with the transparency on each of those items. So if you notice at the very bottom, I have opacity and I can't turn it off. That's because you can't really turn off the opacity turning on or off. It's just either there it's not, but it says that's the default for the entire item for the entire object that we have. So if I click on this opacity and let's just make it 50% so it took everything and applied the opacity onto everything in that particular object to say Undo to that. But the other thing I can do is I can have independent capacity for each item so I can say maybe I want the stroke, the brown stroke to be a specific capacity. So let's make that 50%. And then when I do that, you'll notice that the brown stroke, um, it looks a little differently. It's split it there, and that's because I now have an opaque are partially transparent line sitting on white. So, of course it's gonna be lighter, this bit of the brown line. Although it is transparent, it's sitting on top of blue, so it's mixing a little differently. And the other thing I had under rapacity are blending modes, and right now I've got it such a normal. And if you're used to blending modes from photo shop, you know that that just tells how the different items react with each other. So in this case, normal, I kind of think of normal is like putting a frosted piece of glass on top of something. It basically made it 50% opaque, percent transparent, and it is just like you kind of see the objects coming from behind. If I say multiply now, it blends together. You know, it's that Brown and that blue took the values of each of those and blended them together a little bit differently. So again we can play with the blending modes as well. Again, I can turn this back so that it is 100%. And I could change just the opacity of the yellow stroke instead. All right, so I could do that and just see how it blends together there. Maybe I change the blending mode a little bit and make that multiply. And because the brown is so much darker, it just swallowed up the yellow. We can't see that at all. So I'm actually gonna put this back 200 normal. All right, so we can actually keep adding strokes and fills, and we can play individually with the a pass ity of each. Does that make sense? Case of the appearance panel is great, because again, I only have to maintain one shape on one. I always like to show is like we just had this line here. And of course you realize what it did is it took the last thing I did. It always takes the last appearance that you did and works with that. But it isn't exactly the same. Is it? Because I don't have that Brown, um, the brown stroke that's there and what happens is it automatically uses last times, but it uses what's called basic appearance, and the basic appearance is the bottom or a top most stroke in the top most Phil. So that's what it did that almost Phyllis Blue on this item here, the last one that I had selected last. I used Top most Phyllis Blue, the only one on the top. Most stroke is the yellow dashed line. So when I create something new and one of the options over here under the appearance panel is new art has basic appearance. So instead of it having all these attributes, it just has the top most filling Tommo stroke. If I turn that off, let's come over and choose that and turn that off. And if I selected this item and then draw something else as soon as I start drawing it, you know, it's it has everything right. It doesn't have just the basic appearance, but that's what illustrator does by default is it finds the last thing you had selected. And that's how it draws the new thing. And it does. But we can tell it that it only has the basic appearance so that you're not trying to delete, you know, 18 different fills or strokes or whatever you've done with that item. So let's do that. And then I have, um, this item here and I want to go ahead and delete the, uh, fill that we had here. And I want the stroke to be just this black stroke and I don't want it to be dashed, right? Someone do that and we'll make it super big. Let's make it like 60. All right, so then I want to create another stroke on top of that, And I would just come down here to create new stroke and the one on top will do that same yellow and let's do it a dash line. Do that and we don't to be 60 points at all. We can make this much thinner. Let's make that 10 point so there wouldn't go. We could make our little road, so I've got Hillary. Rhodes is sometimes just think of how things look instead of thinking, I need to make a black stroke or black path and then draw another one on top of it, which is fine until you decide you don't like the angle of the road and you suddenly just want to change the angle of the road a little bit. Straighten it out a little bit more if you had two separate lines. You have to maintain those two sets of curves and try and actually change those. It's hard enough with one Imagine trying to do both. So for me, I like to put that all in one item and work with it that way. So the appearance panel is huge and I won't go. There's a whole bunch more with the appearance panel again. We covered it more in depth on the essentials, but you can basically sit in, pick and choose what part of each item you're working on. You could really drill down when you've got complex groups. You've got three atoms group together that also part of another group, and you want to get in and just affect Inada. Drop shouters to the whole group versus the individual items of the group. That's all gonna be done in the appearance panel. So either check out the essentials course or looking the help menu or a combination of each. But the appearance panel is where is where all of that lives. That's where is at its at the parents, pal. All right, so I'm gonna delete everything there. This is about strokes in general, and I might have even asked you this last time, and I don't remember. But can you, like, create a custom stroke or is like the only thing you can do is really make it a dashed line? It's the dash, or you can do custom brush strokes. But as faras the strokes, I think there might be plug ins available. Court. I've never actually looked into it, but it's not like in design where you can create your strokes on the I think that's what I was thinking. I'm I want to say there's a plug in that actually does that for you, and so that's something to think about. If something, if the program doesn't do something you want, check out the plug. And in fact, the whole they just changed. The add ons Thing also with this update is that you can go and look up add ons, and I've forgotten the website for now. I'm sure you can get there through your creative cloud application as well, but you can go in there and look for add ons. And then you say, I just want Adams for illustrator. You click on those and I'll just come up and show you all the different Adams. You can load it right from that Web page. Used to be an extensions panel. I don't think it existed, Illustrated, but was an in design. And they just changed that. Like I said just this week, and it's great because you say I wanted to I want to do custom strokes. You go and you find a plug in for that that does custom strokes and then it. Suddenly you've got that functionality built into illustrator, So it's cool. Option. Very cool. Well, we do have some questions for you. Excellent wondering from ailed Brazilian if you could show us again perhaps how to change the radius of the new strokes. So you had the circle and then an extra stoke in the circle. How do you change? The radius of that can change the radius of a stroke. I'm extra struggle. The thickness, the thickness of it. 90 days. Okay, let me, um there good. I have that. They're so Yeah. If you wanted to change the, like, the thickness of the dashed line, we will come appear to that stroke in the appearance panel and click the little blue underlying text. And it pops open the stroke panel for you so we can choose the thickness here and do anything else that we would normally do in the strokes panel, the amount of dash or anything like that. We could also add the arrowheads. If it weren't a circle, we could add arrowheads. Anything else that's in the strokes panel, I hope that switch may cause a radius of a circle sound like math and something to do with pie or something. Yeah, but I mean, I think that's what you think. Yeah, let's see. So we have a question from snuggly who says when you make an open shape with Phil, can you grab a handle on the fell and change its shape? Mm. Change the shape of the fill. So let's do that let's actually create an open shape and it's got a fill. Their So grab the handle and changed the shape. No, the shape is that Phil is always going to go from one end to the other. It's gonna take the quickest route there was in this case. It just goes straight across and by sex, that angle that's there So you could change the handle. You can grab where they handle sits, but it's not going to really change the fillets, basically, just going to keep connecting the two open ends and just make a beeline right for the other end. So you can't really I think what they're asking cannot, you know, change this. Maybe make this more smooth on the bottom. No, the answer is going to be It's always gonna run to the other pointed close it off for you. Cool. So graphic ing just got lost on how to make a double stroke. How to make a double stroke. Um, you can just come and choose that from the strokes panel, so we would just come here and tell it that doesn't have it. Where's my stroke? It doesn't actually have it. It was like he wants. They want to lines, It sounds like. And what do you think? Let us know what you mean. Graphic ing, but I don't think that that's actually possible. You could do. You can't even do 22 on top of each other. You did, too, on top of each other and have one inside and one outside. You know, tell it one to the center on one, out to the center. But yeah, it doesn't even let you do, like a or thin, thick, thick, You know, like you do in in design. It doesn't even have that everything. Maybe we should ask them up. Yes. Okay. Question from Nathan. Can you make appearance styles? You can make what's called graphic style. So, yes, I can take this and say, this is a style. And again, I'm not gonna go into a hole It but graphic styles. If I remember the icon here, I can just say this is a style. I can drag that into my graphic styles panel. And now I can say this item here has this style applied to it so I can just go and say anything new I make, but you remember, you want to click off of it first, because otherwise it's gonna go ahead and draw new ones anyway with that. But if I drew this item here and I wanted to look like this circle, I would just select it. Click in the graphic style, and there it is. And then what? I go to the appearance panel, all that same appearances. They're very cool. Great. Another question we have from our say in our say, Arsalan 11. What's the best way to reverse the angle of any shape? Reverse the angle level shape. Don't know what they mean. It's the best way to reverse the angle of any shape. I don't know if that means to flip it, or if you had a shape here, you want to flip it this way. Are there ways to do either or both of those things you can drag something across. You know, if you had a point that you could drag it, grab the point and drag it across that way. But it's not gonna be exact. I mean, just you'd have to manually pull it across. Adding guides might help because we had guides and, you know, exactly what the distance is that you need to drag something across. But I couldn't guarantee that this was exactly across. I would probably duplicated and do the, um the reflect tool to get right. Come on grounds. That sounds like an easier way. Any more questions in the studio audience? Cool. Let me just double check. Major, we don't have any more. Coming through one from Nathan was Can you show us again how you make a dotted line using rounded cap dashes? Yep. So if we just we just have this line here and let's make it thicker so you can see it if I come in here and I just tell it that this stroke is rounded, cap, it's gonna go ahead and put, though it's gonna, of course, put the rounding in between as well. So I might want to make my gap a little bit bigger in this case. So I'm glad. Do that Make it slightly bigger, get kind of a nice gap going there. So again, it puts the rounding on all the different portions of the stroke a swell, so it's not going to just round the ends. It's going around every time it meets an end like that. Okay? And I think that's pretty similar to this question from Bethany. Is there a way to make a dash stroke with round dashes? Yep, that's it. And then we have another question from snood early. Can you simulate airbrush in illustrator you can. There's a whole set of brushes, and I'm not even going to do brushes today. But there's a whole sets of brushes. There's one that's here. For instance. There's when I just took that dash line that I did, and it just made it like a big brush stroke that's there. So I definitely check out brushes. I covered brushes and custom brushes in detail in the essentials. Raise well and from pearly. Can you warp the shape an illustrator like you can in Photoshopped Warp it. Basically, you have to draw the points out themselves. Yeah, I mean, there's some effects that you can do. You can grab and do, like twirl on bloat and all that, but it's kind of it's not random, but you're kind of at its mercy. You can't actually sit there, just kind of pull on it and warp it. I know what they're talking about. Like when you just run over something, you want to just make it a little bit blow to your smaller. You can write that you have to actually pull the points themselves because it's not pixel based. Where is there? You're actually truly pushing pixels around like that Here. You have to actually take the vectors and be able to control them by the handles. Right? And really, really mold it. Yeah. All right. Great. We do have another question. They're coming in. Good. Everybody is waking up to the O questions. America will more live. I love it. Okay. From Indigo. How do you turn an appearance into a graphic style? I missed it. Oh, it's simple. We just let's actually grabbed this guy again. It's really difficult we put this here, and then we open up the graphic styles. We just take the item that we like and drag that item go into the panel. Not easy peasy. Yep. All right. How about a photo as a graphic style from Arsalan 11. Can we add of photo running? No, no, you can't have the photo. You can say you can have the photo mask. And you can have that style. But what the graphic styles don't remember is size or anything like that is just taking the appearance is just saying there is this shape or this frame that's here and I'll recreate it. But as far as what size that is, that's not included in the graphic shape at all or the graphic style.