- [Voiceover] In this movie we'll
take a look at the rotate tool.
And I think it's at this point that the value of the
transformation origin really becomes obvious.
I'll go ahead and press Control + A or Command + A
on the Mac in order to select everything I've made so far.
And I'll press the Backspace key or the
Delete key on the Mac to get rid of it.
And I'm just gonna go ahead and switch to a different color,
maybe this shade of green here.
And I'll go ahead and take the
line weight up to three points.
And I'll once again select the rectangle tool,
which of course you can get by pressing the M key.
And I'll Alt or Option + click right there at the
intersection of those two guides.
And 100 by 100 points is gonna work just fine,
so we'll go ahead and click OK.
Alright, now I'll press the V key to switch back
to the black arrow tool, and just so that we have something
to compare, I'll press the Enter key or the Return key
on the Mac to bring up the Move dialog box,
and I'll go ahead set the horizontal value to 100 points
and vertical to zero points, and I'll click Copy.
And then I'll select the original, press the Enter key
or the Return key again and change the
horizontal value to negative 100.
Alright, now let's say I want to make a kind of
pattern of diamond-shaped petals.
I'll go up to the effect menu, choose Distort and Transform,
and choose the Transform command.
And then I'll go ahead and turn on the Preview checkbox,
and I'll just go ahead and rotate
this guy 45 degrees like so.
And this time around we don't need scale strokes and
effects to be turned on, so I'll
just go ahead and turn that off.
And notice that I'm rotating the shape around its center,
as indicated by this little point
inside the reference point matrix.
At which point I'll click OK in order to accept that change.
Now I want to stretch this shape,
and I have to do that in a separate pass,
because notice if I were to click on the word Transform
to bring back my Transform Effect dialog box,
and let's say I turn on the Preview checkbox and I change
the horizontal value to 120, and the vertical value to 70,
which is what I'm ultimately looking for,
you can see that Illustrator is applying the scale
before the rotation, and that's not what I want.
So I'll just go ahead and cancel out of there,
and instead, I'll apply a new transform effect by
going to the Effect menu, choosing Distort and Transform,
and choosing the Transform command once again.
And I do want to apply a new effect,
so I'll go ahead and click this button.
At which point I'll now change the horizontal scale
value to 120%, and I'll take the vertical value down to 70%,
and turn on the Preview checkbox in
order to produce this effect here.
Alright, now let's rotate a handful of these guys
by returning to the Effect menu, and if you like,
instead of dropping all the way down to
Distort and Transform and choosing Transform,
which is gonna zero out all the options like usual,
you can instead choose this command right there,
Transform..., which is gonna bring
back your last applied settings.
I'll go ahead and click Apply New Effect once again,
and then I don't actually want to repeat these settings,
and so I'll change both the horizontal
and vertical values back to 100%.
And I'll set the angle value to, let's say,
45 degrees, turn on the Preview
checkbox so we can see what's happening.
I want to rotate this shape around its middle-center,
like so, and then I'm gonna crank the copies value up to,
let's say, a total of seven so
that we have eight diamonds in all.
Now I don't want them to overlap each other,
so I'm gonna have to move them apart,
and so the first thing I'll do is change the
horizontal move value to, let's say, negative 10.
That doesn't quite do what I want,
so I'll also change the vertical move value to
negative 10, and that's just plain wrong.
So what I need to do is just sort of arrow this value
until things look more or less correct,
which is happening someplace around a vertical value of
negative 23 or negative 24, at which point I'll go ahead
and click OK to accept that change.
Alright, now compare that to how much more authoritatively
you can operate using the old-school rotate tool.
So, I'll start off by selecting the shape right there.
And then I'll switch to the rotate tool,
which you can get by pressing the R key.
And with that tool selected, I'll press the Enter key
or the Return key on the Mac to
bring up the rotate dialog box.
So anytime we have transform tool selected,
pressing Enter or Return brings up its dialog box,
complete with numerical options.
And so what I'm gonna do is just change the angle
value to 45 degrees and click OK.
And then, I'll switch back to the scale tool,
which I can get by pressing the S key of course,
and I'll press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac,
and I'll go ahead and change the horizontal value to
120% and the vertical value to 70%, which automatically
turns on the Non-uniform radio button.
So you don't have to worry about that.
As long as we're here, go ahead and turn off the
Scale Corners checkbox even though, of course, in our case
it's not gonna make any difference, and then click OK.
Alright, now what we want to do is switch back to the
rotate tool, and then you wanna
click to set a transformation origin.
And I'm gonna click, let's say, right about here
along that horizontal guideline.
And now notice I can drag around that origin point
in order to rotate my diamond.
And so, a couple things to know here,
the farther you move your cursor away from the origin,
the more fine-tune control you're gonna get.
Also, if you want to constrain your rotation to an
increment of 45 degrees, go ahead and press and hold
the Shift key as you see me doing right now.
And then, if you also want to create a copy of
the shape as you rotate it, then press and hold the
Alt key or the Option key on the Mac,
at which point you'll get that double arrowhead cursor,
and then keep those keys down until after you release.
Alright, now I wanna create another duplicate of this shape.
And to do that, I'll go up to the
Object menu, chose Transform.
Notice by the way, that we've got a
Rotate command, we have a Scale command.
These commands bring up the very same dialog boxes
that we've been seeing when the
rotate and scale tools are selected.
But the command I'm gonna choose is Transform Again,
which also has a keyboard shortcut
of Control + D for duplicate.
And so as you can see, Illustrator goes ahead and both
rotates and duplicates the shape like so.
Alright, now just go ahead and press Control or
Command + D as many times as it
takes to fill out my pattern.
Now the great thing about this static approach,
is that if you go ahead and zoom in,
you will see that everything is aligned perfectly,
especially along this horizontal guideline here.
Whereas where the dynamic effect is concerned,
we may or may not be dead on.
It's looking pretty darn good until we start
zooming way in, at which point you
can see that things are ever so slightly off.
Alright, so I'll just go ahead and press Control + 0
or Command + 0 on the Mac to zoom out.
And that is how you create a static rotation
with a high degree of authority using the old-school
rotate tool here inside Illustrator.