- [Voiceover] Alright, let's take a look at object blending
where Illustrator automatically creates
a bunch of intervals between two shapes.
And so the first thing I'm gonna do is
go up to file menu and choose "New from Template"
or I could press "control shift n"
or "command shift n" on the Mac
then I'll go ahead and open up
my center guides document there.
And I'll start by drawing just a plain old rectangle
and of course you can get the rectangle tool
by pressing the "m" key.
Now I'll actually go ahead
and press the shift key as I drag
in order to create a square.
And now let's give this guy a yellow fill, let's say,
and I'll change the stroke to this darker shade of orange.
But it doesn't really matter,
you can obviously go your own way.
Alright, now I'm gonna switch to the ellipse tool
and I'll go ahead and draw a circle
by pressing and holding the shift key as I drag.
And let's go ahead and change this guy
to the shade of light blue here.
And I'll change the stroke to a darker shade of blue
and also thicken up that stroke to, let's say,
something like 12 points to make it pretty obvious.
And that way you can see
that blends work with both fills and strokes.
Alright, now I'll go ahead and switch back
to the black arrow tool,
which you can get by pressing the "v" key.
And I'll shift click on this square in order to select it.
Now to blend between the two shapes.
You go up to the object menu,
you choose blend, and you choose the make command,
which has a keyboard shortcut of "control alt b"
or "command option b" on the Mac.
And we end up with this effect here
so we're essentially creating a kind of custom gradient
between the two strokes.
And as a result,
the gradient is progressing from this medium shade of blue
to orange over here in the upper left hand corner.
But if I were to zoom in,
you can see that the strokes
are growing incrementally thinner
and as a result towards the end we're seeing gaps
between the strokes that appear yellow
because that's the color of the square's fill.
Alright, I'm gonna go ahead and zoom out here.
Now let's say what you wanna do
is change the number of intervals between the two shapes.
Then you would go up to the object menu,
revisit the blend sub-menu,
and choose blend options,
which will bring up this dialogue box.
Now notice by default,
spacing is set to smooth color.
And so what that does is it instructs Illustrator
to automatically choose the number of intervals
it needs in order to create a smooth gradient.
I want to change that spacing to specified steps.
You can, however, do distance.
That's going to be the distance between your intervals,
but if you choose specified steps
that's going to be the number of intervals inbetween.
And notice that Illustrator's telling me
well right now you're seeing 240 intervals.
If you want to change that value
presumably you'd want to turn on the preview checkbox
so that you can see what you're doing.
And I'll go ahead and take this value down to just two
and press the tab key.
And now you can see our two intervals right there,
which again Illustrator refers to as steps.
And so we have a first object in the background,
we have a second object in the foreground,
and then two intervals inbetween.
I'm gonna take that value up to six, let's say,
and then press the tab key so we can see the effect.
And now I'll click okay in order to accept that change.
Alright, now the great thing about an object blend like this
is that it's entirely dynamic.
So if I make any changes to the square or the circle
those changes will be reflected by the intervals inbetween.
And so now that we've got live shapes,
I'll go ahead and switch to the ellipse tool
so that I can see the specialized widgets.
And notice now that I can drag the center of this ellipse,
assuming that you're seeing your widgets on screen,
and the ellipse will move to a different location
and all the intervals inbetween
will move to a different location as well.
The other option is to create a pie
by dragging this guy right here
and I'll go ahead and drag it all the way
over to this location
and I'll drag this guy over to the right hand side as well.
So that we can see
the evolution of a square turning into a pac-man.
Alright, I'll go ahead and drag this guy up
just a little bit and the same's gonna happen
if I move over to the square
and adjust its round corner, which is like so.
And at that point we're gonna start to see
some rounding at the top of these initial shapes.
And incidentally, just in case
you turned off your live shape widgets,
just go ahead and switch over to the white arrow tool,
which you can get by pressing the "a" key.
And then just go ahead
and click off the shapes to deselect them
and then click inside one of the shapes to select it.
For example, I've clicked inside my pie-shaped circle
and then you would go ahead and select
either the rectangle tool or the ellipse tool,
in which point you can see the shape widgets icon
up here in the control panel,
and you can either turn it off to make the widgets go away
or you can turn it on to make those widgets come back.
Alright, and the other thing I can do is
switch back to the white arrow tool
and drag the shape around
and that's gonna cause the blend
to update automatically as well.
And last, I just want you to notice
in case you haven't already,
that each one of the intervals is gradually progressing
in terms of fill and stroke color
as well as line weight.
And so with the circle selected,
if I was to take that line weight up to,
let's say, 24 points and press the enter key
or the return key on a Mac,
that's going to affect all the intervals inbetween as well.
And so that's how you create
an object blend between two shapes
and have an update dynamically
in response to any modifications
you might make here inside Illustrator.