Transcript:
So you want to make some cool 3d graphics, but you don’t want to have to learn blender or cinema 4d or any other kind of 3d modeling program? So today I’m going to show you how you can use illustrators, Built-in 3d effect to make some awesome 3d line art. I’m going to be making something very similar to my current Windows desktop wallpaper, So let’s go ahead and open illustrator. Let’s go ahead and make a new document. It doesn’t really matter what size you do because this isn’t going to be any kind of printed media. It’s all going to be digital, so just use whatever size you want. I usually go with 11. By 11. So now that you have your document open, Let’s go ahead and load in our logo. So for this tutorial, I’m going to be using the Apple logo. So one quick thing before we get started. Make sure that your logo is not black or any kind of super dark color. Because once you start doing a 3d effect, the 3d part of the shape will sort of have like a darker shade. So if your logo is already black, you’re not going to be able to tell what exactly is 3d and what’s like the front surface. Alright, so now that we have our logo all good, let’s go ahead and go into the effect menu. Go into 3d and extrude and bevel. So this opens a new menu. You can go ahead and mess around with the angle that you want your logo to be facing. All right, so now that you have your angles all set up, Let’s go ahead and go into this perspective menu. So on the top spec wallpaper that I made, I actually messed around with this a little bit. It sort of just changes the warping of the logo. I guess you could say, so I’m going to set this to probably just around 50. All right, so another thing you might notice is that the depth of the 3d effect is pretty shallow, so you’re able to go into here in the extrude depth setting and let’s go ahead and turn that up. All right, we’re going to go with around 100 on that so another thing that you might notice. Is this surface setting? So you’re able to go in and pick wireframe? And now we’re going to go ahead and click OK, all right, so now we have our 3d effect sort of in progress, but that’s not all we have to do. You might notice that it doesn’t really look anything like that Other wallpaper that I made earlier, so we’re going to have to expand this and start combining shapes together, so we don’t get all this overlapping going on, so go ahead and select your logo go to object and click expand appearance. So one thing you might notice is that this process is a little bit finicky because illustrator doesn’t really intend for this effect to be used for this purpose. So you kind of got to mess around with it, so I’m going to ungroup this and see what exactly, uh, there’s several layers of groups going on, so then you can like release these clipping masks. Everything is just kind of in their own little part, so you got to kind of break them apart here. And then eventually we’re going to go in and start using the shape builder tool to combine all them into one so now we’re going to go ahead and select the logo and go into the shape builder tool and we’re going to go ahead and see what exactly we have ready. And what isn’t yet so yeah. This process is a little bit finicky, but trust me. The end result is totally worth it. So yes, as I said before in the video. Illustrator does not really intend for you to be expanding these objects and going into all the inner workings on how these 3d objects are put together, so it might be really overwhelming to see all these shapes and anchor points going on. But you just kind of have to have some patience with it. There’s a few clipping masks that you might have to release there might be some groups you have to ungroup, but eventually everything should come together, Kind of its it’s kind of a trial and error process, but, uh, you just got to keep going back and forth in and out of the shape builder tool and see what exactly is left and what you need to figure out how to fix. It’s like like. I said It’s very much trial and error, so just have patience with it. Um, the end product is totally worth it in my personal opinion. So yeah, that’s kind of what I’m doing in this part of the video, It’s kind of a time lapse of me figuring out what I need to do in order to combine all these shapes together, all right, so it looks like that. We’ve run into the problem again with the leaf of the Apple, so we’re going to go ahead and click Ungroup release compound path and we’re going to go in and delete these little lines, so some of them. We might have to do some things later. So like this one. Nevermind, that one’s fine, but this right here seems to be connected to the top of this. What we can do in this situation is just kind of make a box on top of it and then unite it in the Pathfinder tool, but we’ll do that in a little bit, so in order to make this a little bit easier for you to see, um, what you can also do is get rid of the fill on your logo as you’re doing this, and also maybe give it a stroke. Because if you don’t have a stroke, then it’s just a white background. Another thing that I noticed with this project is choosing a logo that has a lot of curves is way more difficult than a logo that has more straight lines because the more curves, your logo has the more of those individual segments illustrator will create when you do the 3d effect, so keep that in mind be aware of how many curves your logo has, for example. The apple logo is entirely curved. There’s no straight lines in it at all, so it’s. This is a pretty difficult logo to do for this. Uh, effect. But the top speckle logo was not bad at all. It has a lot of straight edges. It’s got the t. It’s got the sides of the SS That are totally straight. The only parts that are curved are the little bits of the S, So that logo is definitely a lot easier to do but, um. I thought I would totally still keep this logo. As my example, because it’s kind of a worst case scenario of what you’ll run into with these extra little bits and pieces. All right, so we’re making some progress here. I got a lot of that extra stuff cleared out. I’m gonna figure out how I can get these. Last few bits cleared out, so let’s go ahead and go into object expand. Uh, let’s not do the stroke because I want that still there. Let’s see if that did anything and doesn’t seem like it. So yeah, like I said, like I said in that voiceover, It’s very much a trial and error. Um, process so yeah. I gotta go in here and figure out what I can still remove and what I can’t. Yeah, that seems to be connected to that. So some of the stuff here you might have to go in and literally take your pen tool and sort of, like, do a minus front or unite with the Pathfinder tool. And if you’re not familiar with that, I’ll show you in a second here, so we’re going to go ahead and take our pen tool to remove this bit of line. Go like that. Select that and this there we go that mean it would go away so yeah. It can be really confusing. Sometimes on what exactly is an object. And what isn’t so don’t let it overwhelm you. Um, just keep in, mind that end goal. So another thing you might notice. Is that even though we got rid of those little shapes down here, they’re here again in another kind of object. So like I said, Patience is key for this project. You got to go in here. Do it again! For this object, lets. Go ahead and get pen tool out here like this. Bam bam bam bam select Knight! Oh, maybe not unite for that one. Maybe it’s minus front there. We go yeah, like I said, totally trial and error on literally everything. If you wanted to, you could go in and separate everything out to make a little bit easier to understand, but there’s just so much going on with this, um, automatically generated 3d shape, so there we go that looks a little bit better and now we can also go in here. Delete all these little guys, all right, so here we are now. Everything looks a little bit more cleaned up as you probably saw in that little time lapse section. There definitely are some parts that are kind of extra and don’t have to be there but like. I said I’m trying to do this a little bit quick so that I can get this tutorial done. And so you guys understand the basics of it. If you wanted to go through and get rid of all the other extra little segments you can. It requires a lot of patience. So yeah, there’s that, um, so I know somebody might bring up in the comments. You could easily do something like this will be your logo and then this will be another logo. Let’s put it up front and then do options. Blend, blend options, smooth color. Okay, option, blend, make and like maybe doing something like this. You can easily do that. Um, and see, yeah, you. Can you can morph the objects? You can morph two objects together or you can. There should be a way to like, expand this and kind of do the same exact thing and it might end up being a little bit better, but I really like how this for this one you’re able to change the perspective and make it a little bit more abstract. You know, it’s a little bit like warped looking, which I really like, so that’s kind of why. I like doing this technique, So what I’m going to do next is going. I’m going to do what I did with the top spec version of this and I’m going to make a little bit of like a line background, so I’m going to go ahead and group all this together so that way. I don’t mess with it anymore. That’s kind of done and out of the way, so I’m gonna like, make sure all this is one stroke, though. Let’s go like one. Yeah, that looks good So now what I’m going to do. Is I’m going to make a bunch of lines that are all the same stroke width. Okay, so now what we’re going to do before I do, any of the color stuff is? We are going to do this to get rid of those lines. All right, cool, cool, starting to look really nice. Um, so now. How many do we have one? Two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, Ten, Eleven. Twelve cool that’ll work. I think how many colors are there. One two, three awesome. There’s six colors 12 lines. So these two will be green Ctrl X to shift it to a stroke. These two will be this yellowy color. Gotta switch that around. Nice, okay, so, yeah, you’ll notice there’s this little spiky guy, and there’s some other stuff going on. So if you wanted to go through and fix all that, you totally can sort of what I did on the top spec version of this. But, uh, this version is for a tutorial, so let’s go ahead and make a clipping mask on all of these. So now we have our Apple logo with a nice little background. Going on, a lot of this stuff is very much trial and error. This is kind of the, um, effect I was going for. It could look a little bit better, but you know like. I said I was trying to get this kind of short so that you guys could all understand what I was doing here. Um, so this is kind of the end product. If you wanted to take any kind of vector based logo, put it into illustrator and make a 3d wireframe effect. If you guys enjoyed the video, be sure to leave a like. We’re uploading every single Monday tech content tutorials. I guess now we’re doing graphic stuff, too. So if you’re interested in any of that stuff, feel free to subscribe Anyways, That’s about it. I’m Connor. And this is top spec. Thanks for watching [Music] you?