- [Voiceover] In this movie, I'll show you how to expand
the contents of a layer, which is where things get really
interesting where the layers panel is concerned, and that's
because all of the sudden you have other means of object
level control, you can lock and unlock specific objects,
you can hide and show them, you can locate an object inside
the layers panel, and you can gain access to the contents
of things like the compound shapes that we saw in the
previous chapter, so here I am looking at this project
from Deke's Techniques 207 about creating your own custom
grumpy bird, and, let's say I'm trying to select something
inside this document and I click right about here.
Now, this is a pretty complex illustration because it
contains dynamic effects about which we will learn more in a
future chapter of this very course but let's say I
wanna lock this object down so I don't accidentally select
it in the future because, notice, if I drag it, this
rectangle somehow, these rolling hills in the background,
that is not something that I have any desire to mess up.
So, a long time option has been to go up to the object menu,
choose lock, and then choose selection, or you have that
keyboard shortcut control two, or command two on the Mac.
That's not a command I suggest you use, or a shortcut you
should assign to memory, because there's a much better way
to work these days, what you wanna do now is, first, what
layer you're working in is the back layer here inside the
layers panel, and by the way, I'm gonna need some more room
to work, so I'm gonna go ahead and drag these panels right
here, which contain the pathfinder panel, and put them back
in the icon column, and then, I'll twirl open this layer and
I'll go searching for this item, and it's right there, I can
tell that it's selected because it has a little purple
square right next to it, and so if I wanna lock it, I'll
just go ahead and click right there, in a lock icon, and
that will lock it down, of course, I can unlock the object
by clicking on that icon again.
However, in my case, I definitely wanna lock it down, and
then I accidentally select this, and I can see that it's
this item right here, so I'll go ahead and lock it down and
so forth, another option is to hide and show an object.
So, let's say I click on this thick boundary right here,
it's part of the bird layer, and so, just so I can see
things a little better, I'm gonna twirl this back layer
closed by clicking on its triangle, and then I'll twirl this
bird layer open, or even better, rather than searching up
and down this stack, I'll just go to the layers panel
fly-out menu and I will choose locate object, at which point
Illustrator will automatically twirl open that layer and
show me the selected object right there, and let's say what
I want to do with it is hide it, then I would just click on
its eyeball in order to hide it, or click again to show the
object, now, let's say I go ahead and turn off a bunch of
eyeballs here, I want you to know that there's a command to
bring everything back, so, if you go up to the object menu,
you have the option of choosing unlock all, which will
unlock every single item inside your illustration, or,
in my case, what I want is show all, which is gonna show
every single object in illustration, and it's gonna select
them, too, so I know exactly what objects I just got done
revealing, alright, now I'm gonna press control shift A, or
command shift A on the Mac, to de-select the object, and
I'm gonna click right here inside the bird, and I want you
to notice up here on the far left side of the control panel
this is a compound shape that contains a bunch of live
sub-paths, just as we saw in the previous chapter, well,
one way to gain access to those sub-paths so that I can edit
the contents of this compound shape, is to, of course,
double click inside the object in order to enter the
isolation mode, and then I can, for example, select this
shape right here and drag it around to modify the highlight
on the edge of the bird, problem is, I can't really see what
I'm doing in this mode, I'm not really getting a sense of
what's happening here, and that's because of the dimming
that's occurring in the background, so I'm gonna escape out
of the isolation mode, press control shift A, or command
shift A on a Mac, in order to de-select the object, and
what I'll do is click, once again, on this big compound
shape, and I'll go to the layers panel, click on the fly-out
menu icon, and once again, choose locate object, and that is
going to not only find the object right here inside this
bird layer, but it's going to expand it, as well.
And so here we are, with an expanded version of that
compound shape, so I could go ahead and twirl it closed, but
if I want access to the individual sub-paths I need to
twirl it open like so, and then notice these little circles
in this right hand column, they are formally known as target
icons, internally inside Adobe, they're known as meatballs.
So, take your pick, what I'm gonna do is click in this guy
right there, the top one, to target this sub-path right
there, at which point I can now modify its placement using
the black arrow tool because I took a moment to target it
first here inside the layers panel, then if I want to
target this guy and see what in the heck's going on with him
I could click on this so-called meatball and then I could
drag this shape around, which ends up affecting all three
of his feathers, as you can see inside the document window.
And then, if ever you decide you want to clean up your
layers panel a little bit, you can just click the down
pointing triangle in front of the layer name in order to
twirl that layer closed, and you can press control shift A
or command shift A on a Mac, in order to de-select
everything, and that's how you expand the contents of a
layer to reveal every single object on that layer,
regardless of how buried or small, here inside Illustrator.