- In this movie, I'll show you the difference
between absolute and relative rounding.
So, for starters here, I'll go ahead and click
inside this star in order to select it
with my white arrow tool.
And then, I'll double click on any one of these
round corner widgets to bring up
the Corners dialog box.
And notice, in addition to these various corner options,
including round and inverted round, and chamfer,
we also have these two rounding icons down here.
Now they're not going to produce any effect with chamfer,
so I'll go ahead and switch back to inverted round,
which I had applied before,
and now notice by default, rounding is now set to absolute.
Meaning that we're getting the same degree of rounding
on each and every one of these bumps.
And essentially what Illustrator is doing
is drawing a perfect quarter circle
at every one of these locations.
But, if I switch over to relative,
then in the case of this star,
I'm going to make some of these corners
sharper as we're seeing here.
So the corners down at the bottom,
they're remaining more or less quarter ellipses,
but as we move upward to what are basically
more acute corners, we are seeing harsher lumps.
So once again, this is what we see with absolute rounding.
And this is what we see with relative rounding.
Now, in my case, we are seeing sharper lumps,
just as in the case of the appearance of the icon.
But that's not always the way things reconcile.
To give you a sense for what's really going on,
I'll go ahead and click OK to accept that change,
and now I'm going to turn my guides layer back on
so I can see those center guides,
and I'm going to create a kind of custom ellipse
using the rectangle tool.
So I'll start by selecting the Rectangle tool
from the Shape Tool fly out menu.
And then I'll position my cursor
at the intersection of the two guidelines.
And then I will alt+ or opt+ click
to bring up the Rectangle dialog box.
And I'm looking for a square that has
width and height values of 100 points each.
At which point, I'll go ahead and click OK
to create that rectangle like so.
Alright, now I want to rotate it
so it's more of a diamond.
So I'll click on the word Transform
up here in the Control Panel.
I'll make the center reference point is selected.
And I'll go ahead and change
that rotate value to 45 degrees.
And I'll press the Tab key in order to rotate that square.
Alright, now I want to make it wider.
And so I'm going to turn off the link icon.
You want to make sure you have a broken chain.
And then click on the W to select the width value
and change it to 300 points
in order to produce this effect here.
Alright, now I'll go ahead and press the Enter key,
or the Return key on a Mac, to accept that change.
And if you're working along with me,
you'll see Shape Expanded appeared for just a moment
up here at the top of the screen.
And that's because you no longer have
the so-called smart rectangle.
That doesn't really matter because we still have
all these corner points to work with.
Now I'm going to press the A key
to switch to the white arrow tool, as we're seeing here.
And I'm going to turn off a couple of points here
by shift+clicking on the top and bottom points
so that only the left and right points are selected.
And now I'm going to change my corners value
up here in the Control panel to 24 points
because I want some pretty exacting results here.
And then I'll press the Enter key,
or the Return key on a Mac to accept that change.
So now we have what amounts to
an acute corner over here on the left and right sides.
And yet, Illustrator is still tracing them
with perfect quarter circles.
Now I'll click on a top point to select it,
and shift+click on the bottom point to select it as well.
And then, I will drag upward on this lower widget
as far as I can until I go way past
the top edge as you're seeing here.
Notice the other widget moved way below the bottom edge.
And I end up with this maximum
corners value of 243.78 points.
And that's going to vary depending on the size of the shape.
But if you're doing exactly what I'm doing,
you'll get that result as well.
And we end up with this kind of modified ellipse.
You may wonder why would you do that?
Why would you ever go through the steps
when you have the ellipse tool,
which gives you better looking results?
And the reason is we can customize our experience
using round corners.
Alright, now I'll alt+click or opt+click
on the outline of the shape
to select the entire thing.
And then I'll double click on any one of these
round corners widgets to revisit the Corners dialog box.
And now notice you can still switch your corner type
to, for example, inverted round
which produces this interesting effect.
And if you switch to Chamfer,
you're going to restore a rectangle.
So again, you can customize
this experience as much as you want.
I'm going to switch back to round,
and now I'm going to switch from absolute,
which is trying to draw those perfect arcs, to relative.
And if you look closely, I'll do that again.
This is the appearance of absolute rounding.
And this is the appearance of relative rounding.
And notice when I switch to relative,
the acute corners become sharper,
they become bigger lumps,
and the less acute corners, these big corners
right here, they flatten out.
And as a result, we get a smoother shape.
At which point I'll click OK in order to accept that change.
Alright now, just for the sake
of getting something done here,
let's turn this shape into an eye
by pressing control+c or command+c on a Mac,
in order to copy the shape to the clipboard.
Now I'll go ahead and shift+click
inside the custom starburst to select it as well.
And then I'll go up to the Object menu,
choose Compound Path and choose Make.
And that moves the shape in front of the text.
So I'll right click somewhere inside the document window,
choose Arrange, and choose Send to Back,
in order to send that shape in back of the text.
And then to paste that shape
that I just copied into the background,
you want to go up to the Edit menu,
and choose Paste in Back,
or you have that keyboard short cut
of Control+b or Command+b on a Mac.
And it looks like we just filled in the path,
but that's because it's filled with the same color
as the starburst, which will become evident
as soon as we rotate it
by clicking on the word Transform
over here on the right side of the Control panel.
Make sure that center reference point
is once again selected,
and change the rotate value to 90 degrees.
And then press the Enter key,
or the Return key on a Mac, to apply that change.
Alright now I think the iris should be purple.
So I'm going to click on the first color swatch
and I'm going to change it to this
shade of purple right there,
the one that begins with R=147.
Alright now I'm going to create the pupil
by clicking on the word Transform once again.
And this time I want the link to be on,
so I'm going to go ahead and click on this chain icon,
so that the width and height values are linked together,
and now I'll click on the width value and change it to 70%,
so you want to enter the percent value.
And then, because I want to make a copy of this shape,
I'll press alt+enter, or option+return on a Mac.
Alright now, we want this shape to be black,
so I'll go ahead and click on the first color swatch
and change it to black like so.
Alright now we need to create a little highlight.
So I'll click on the word Transform once again.
Click on the W in order to select the width value.
Change it to 33% and then press alt+enter,
or option+return on a Mac,
to create a smaller copy of that shape.
Let's change it's fill to white.
And then I'm going to press shift+ up arrow
three times and shift+left arrow once
in order to move the highlight
into the position you see it now.
And now I'll go ahead and click off
the shape to de-select it.
And I'll turn off the guides layer
so we can take in the final version
of this awkward art.
And that is how you switch between
absolute and relative rounding
here inside Illustrator.