Transcript:
So I’ve got all these lines here, and I need to trim them down and I need the lines to stay relatively straight. Keep them organized, and I also need to use this curved line as a guide now. I could do it one of three ways. I could grab the anchors here and I could drag them down and align them to the curved line, but that’ll take forever. I could also use the scissor tool and trim along the curved line. Select this excess. Delete it again. That’ll take forever now. I could also use the eraser tool, but the eraser tool it’s not really aligned to the curve and these lines not so straight if there was a way to just select all these lines and use one tool, one swipe and magically erase the lines. Keep it organized. Keep it straight perfect just the way. I want it! It can also take these lines right here and combine them to create various shapes like this one here, keep watching this video and I’ll show you how to use the Adobe Illustrator shape builder tool. So here we have our black lines, including our red trim line and we’re going to be using this red trim line as our guide in order to make all our cuts. Now we’re going to be using the shape builder tool, which is this little puffy cloud with an arrow next to it, so click on that and you’ll notice right away that the tool can’t really do anything. You’ve got this arrow with a circle and a line through it. What you have to do is you have to select everything that you want to be affected by the tool, including the red to trim line, and that is the most important thing because the illustrator has to know what you want to use as a cutting line now we’re gonna click on our sheet builder tool. You’re gonna click Alt on PC option on Mac and you’re just going to click and drag and anywhere that this line touches, it will affect the artwork and let go of your mouse, and it removes all your lines. Now we’re gonna undo that, and let’s say we wanted to only affect specific lines, so we can go back in here and I’m going to deselect all these lines one by one, and I’m going to create kind of like, a custom effect. Now again, these lines aren’t selected so now when I go to the shape builder tool hit alt or option on Mac swipe through. It only erases the lines that I chose so you can really customize what you want just by making a good selection now in this next example, we’ve got a star shape. Now the one thing. Well, this star shape is that every component of this star shape is separated. Right now. They’re all aligned by the anchor points, but they’re not joined together, so typically how you would join these as you’d select it. Go up to object down to path and click on join now. All the anchor points are joined together, creating a solid shape. Now we can do the same thing with the shape builder tool, so let me undo that. And separate this out again and select all the anchor points click on the shape builder tool. And now when you move the cursor within the shape, you’ll see this gray pattern up here, and that just means that all the anchor points are aligned. You click once and it’ll automatically join all the anchor points together, creating a solid shape, just like the joint command did now. The key here is to align the anchors. Now let me undo this and I’ll move. One of these anchors aside, select the whole shape and try it again and you’ll notice there’s no great pattern, So let me undo that, and I can reselect everything. Click on the shape builder. Click once and now that it’s a solid shape. I can fill it with a color now. Let’s move on to our 3d cube. So here we have all of our lines that make up our cube. So I’m going to select them all and choose the shape builder. I’m going to press option Alt and I’m going to start slowly erasing all of the excess lines in order to create my base cube shape, so just kind of go through, erase all these extra lines. Now you may end up with little blobs like this and just click on them to delete them and then continue on erasing all these extra lines here like so, and now we have our base cube now let go of option or Alt, and we’re going to start Joining sections. We’re going to join these triangles to create three shapes and this will create the top shape and this side one here and this side here now. The interior again, just three simple shapes swipe across swipe across there and there. Now we’ve got our base kind of cube shape. Now you can tell these are individual pieces. If you grab them, move them aside, you’ll see that there are different shapes. Now you’ll notice that there are little kind of blobs left over from the joining process. We’re gonna have to get rid of those so. I’m gonna undo the move that I just did, and I’m gonna select all my shapes down the middle and cut them, and then I’m going to select all those blobs, delete and then paste back my selection and I’m gonna go up to edit and copy. I’m gonna make a duplicate of that. I’m going to remove the stroke here, and I’m going to fill this with a color, so I’m going to just fill it with a solid brown here. Maybe something a little lighter, and then I’m gonna choose shapes facing one side, and I’m gonna choose something a little bit lighter and then choose the shapes facing the other side and choose an even lighter color now. I’m going to paste back actually. Before I do that, lets. Lock this down, so I’m going to select it all go to object Lock selection. I’m going to lock it in place so that I don’t accidentally edit it and now I’m gonna bring back my outlines, and I’m going to just select the interior of my shapes and I’m going to cut them, so I’m gonna go to edit and cut, and I’m just working with the main outline here and you’ll notice there’s there’s extra anchor points in the middle here, so I’m gonna have to select these and erase them just to keep my artwork clean, and I’m gonna go down to object path and remove anchor points to remove them now. I’m going to select my outline. Am just gonna thicken up the stroke to maybe a two point, and I’m gonna go to edit and paste in front. Bring back my interior artwork. And now I have my completed cube with color and with an outline. I hope you enjoyed this. Quick, run down at the shape builder tool. If you’d like to see more, please hit the subscribe button, so you catch all my future videos. Thanks for watching.