- [Voiceover] Alright, our first project is going
to be to create this cube of cubes,
and in case you saw me do this
back in Deke's Techniques 241 and 242
which came out in the year 2013,
you should know that I've updated the technique
and I've streamlined it to make it easier to pull off.
Now, we're going to start things off
by creating this first orthogonal cube
right here in the center.
And, I think this is the kind of skill
that every Illustrator user should have
because it doesn't actually rely on skewing
or slanting or anything like that.
Rather, you're best off drawing it
using the plain old line tool.
And so, I'm going to be creating this effect from scratch
by going up to the File Menu and choosing New from Template
or you can press Control + Shift + N
or Command + Shift + N on the Mac
and then I'll locate that center guides document
and double-click on it in order to create a new file.
And, I'm going to start off
by renaming this drawing layer Primitive
because will be our first primitive side.
Alright, now you want to select the Line Segment tool
which you can get from the Line Tool fly-out menu,
and then, we want to click at the intersection
of these two guidelines
but in order to pull that off effectively
I need for my Smart Guides to be turned on.
So I'll go to the View Menu and choose Smart Guides
and then, I'll click right there at the intersection
of those two guides to bring up this dialog box
and I'll change the length value to 60 points
and I want the angle to be straight down
which is negative 90 degrees,
but you can't enter -90 into this dialog box,
so instead I'll enter 360-90 which gives me 270 degrees
and I'll click OK.
Alright, I'm zoomed out a little bit too far here
so I'm going to zoom in a little bit
and then, I'll go up to the Effect Menu,
choose Distort and Transform
and choose the Transform command
in order to bring up the big Transform Effect dialog box.
And, I want to rotate this guy
360 degrees divided by three
because there's going to be a total of three sides
and that gives me 120 degrees
but if I turn on the Preview check box
you can see that it's rotating from the wrong point.
And so, to fix things,
go ahead and click on the top-left point
in that little reference point matrix right there
and you'll end up rotating this guy like so.
Then, click inside the Copies field
and press the Up-Arrow key to create one and only one copy.
Then, click OK.
Alright, now we want to create the opposite edges
of this first side
and to do that, go up to the Effect Menu
and choose the second instance of Transform,
the one that ends in dot dot dot,
and what that's going to do is bring up the dialog box
complete with our last settings,
but before that happens
Illustrator's probably going to ask you
if you really want to assign
another instance of the same effect
and the answer is yes, you do.
So go ahead and click on the Apply New Effect button
and then return the Rotate value to zero
and go ahead and turn on the Reflect X
and Reflect Y check-boxes, both of those guys,
and then turn on the Preview check-box
and you'll get more of less the sides you're looking for
but they're in totally the wrong location.
To get them more or less in the right place,
go ahead and click in the center
of the reference point matrix
and I say more or less because you can see
that things are off right here.
Notice how these guys don't quite line up with each other?
And that's because the Transform Effect
is always basing its result off of the appearance
of the selected objects
and in this case the thickness of the strokes
are throwing things off.
And so, you could scooch things around
using the Move options here
but you'd have to do some rather intense math
in order to get the right results.
So, the best thing to do is to just click OK
and accept the fact
that things aren't quite as they should be
and then, go over here to the Layers panel,
click on the flyout-menu icon
and choose Duplicate Primitive
in order to make a copy of it
and then, turn the original off
and go ahead and double-click in an empty portion
of this new layer
and let's name this guy Cubes
plural, because eventually we'll have multiple cubes,
and then change the color to gold, let's say,
and then click OK.
Alright, now we need to get the stroke out of the equation
and you do that by clicking on the Stroke swatch right there
and setting it to None.
Now that goes ahead and gets rid of our problems
but it also gets rid of the effect, as you can see,
because Illustrator doesn't really have
anything to hang the effect on at this point.
And so what we need to do is give this thing a fill
which doesn't really make any sense
because, after all, it's a single segment open path
but go ahead and do it by clicking in that first swatch
on the left side of the control panel
and let's just go ahead and set it to Black.
It won't look any different than it did before
but you can see it here inside the thumbnail
in the Layers panel, so it must be there.
And now, to render out that side, go up to the Object Menu
and choose this command right here Expand Appearance
and you should know that Expand is Illustrator's term
for basically taking something dynamic
and making it static.
And so, I'll go ahead and choose Expand Appearance
and you can see that we now have four segments
just as we need
after which point we need to join them together,
because they're currently four independent segments,
by going up to the Object Menu,
choosing Path and choosing Join
or of course you can just press
that ages-old keyboard shortcut
of Control + J here on the PC or Command + J on the Mac
and that goes ahead and gives us a filled shape.
And if you want to confirm that everything is joined
the way it should be, then just press the A key
to switch to the white arrow tool
and click on any old anchor point
and just drag it around and you'll see
that the points are fused together just as they ought to be.
Alright, so I'll just go ahead and press
Control + Z or Command + Z on the Mac
a couple of times in order to restore that filled shape.
And that is how you create the first side
in what will be an orthogonal cube
by applying and then expanding a dynamic Transform Effect
here inside Illustrator.