- [Voiceover] All right now, if you watched
the previous movie in its entirety, to the very end,
then you know that I promised you
how to draw a perfect five-pointed star,
which I am gonna do in the next movie.
But first I need to impart some late-breaking information
that applies to the latest version of Illustrator CC.
And that's the fact that in addition to
live rectangles and live ellipses,
we now have live polygons, which are pretty darn exciting.
And so I'm gonna switch to the polygon tool,
and then I'll press Ctrl + A, or Cmd + A on the Mac
to select these stars, and I'll press the Backspace key,
or the Delete key on the Mac to get rid of them.
And now I'll just go ahead and drag a polygon out
from those center guides right there, and I'll release.
And in my case that happens to make a pentagon.
All right, so far things are looking like they ever have,
with one small exception, and that's that we're seeing
the word Polygon on the far-left side of the Control Panel.
So as with rectangles and ellipses,
Illustrator is aware of what kind of shape this is,
which means that if I were to go to the View menu,
and choose Show Bounding Box, or press
that very important keyboard shortcut these days
of Ctrl + Shift + B, or Cmd + Shift + B on the Mac,
we're gonna see a variety of handles
and widgets surrounding our shape.
And so as with any bounding box,
you can drag a handle to scale or stretch the shape,
you can drag this center point in order to
move the shape around, and if you position your cursor
close to a corner handle, you'll get the rotate cursor
at which point you can rotate the shape,
and see its angle in the heads-up display.
And this is an absolute angle by the way,
if I was to move this back to zero degrees,
then it would be absolutely upright.
And notice that we're getting a little bit of a snap
when Smart Guides are turned on.
And in addition to that, you can press and hold
the Shift key in order to rotate in 45 degree increments.
And you might look at that and say, "Gosh Deke,
"I think you're a big liar because
"22.15 is not a multiple of 45 degrees."
But bear in mind, it's a multiple of 45 degrees
from where we started, so this is all based
on, once again, absolute values.
But let's say I wanna create an absolutely upright polygon,
I'll go ahead and press the Backspace key,
or the Delete key on the Mac to get rid of that one,
and I will drag outward like so,
and I'll press the Shift key which makes the shape
nice and upright, and that way we also get
an upright bounding box as you're seeing right here,
and the angle of the shape is now zero degrees.
Now notice that we also have a round corner widget,
and if you drag that inward, you're gonna round
all of the corners in your polygon.
If you have a specific value in mind,
then just go ahead and double-click on that
round corner widget to bring up the transform panel,
and notice our polygon properties right here.
And so in addition to changing the corner radius,
I could take it to 36 points for example.
I can also change the corner type if I want, so I could
bring those corners in, or I could flatten them off.
And you might figure, well flattening the corner of
a polygon just makes it more of a polygon,
but that's not actually true because
you can favor one side with respect to its neighbors,
and if you change that guy to inverted round,
then you can drag this corner widget in so far
that you get a kind of star shape.
In any event, I'm gonna go ahead and undo that,
and switch things back to the standard round corner.
And in fact, I'm gonna un-round things all the way
by dragging this corner widget up,
until I see that the roundness value is now zero points.
All right you have a couple of ways
to numerically scale your polygon.
For starters here you have a polygon radius value,
and so if I were to change this value to 300 points,
in my case that's gonna grow the polygon.
And by the way, you can think of it as
being a polygon now, that's gonna fit inside of a circle
that has a radius of 300 points,
or if you prefer, a diameter of 600 points.
Another way to scale the shape is with
this polygon side length, and so if I set any side
of the polygon to 300 points, that's gonna make the shape
that much smaller, and it's also going to change
the radius value because these two values
are locked in sync with each other.
But my favorite setting of all is this side count,
and so I can actually change the number of sides
after drawing a rectangle, here inside the latest version
of Illustrator, which is very exciting stuff.
But I want you to see something.
If I take this value down back to five let's say,
and then I change the corner radius value to 36,
so we have these round corners, all of which by the way
are locked into alignment with each other,
and then I change this side count just by clicking in it,
and pressing the up arrow key,
my corners revert to sharp corners as we're seeing here.
So anytime you change the number of sides,
you lose your round corners.
But of course only temporarily, because
you can change them back anytime you like.
Also notice this diamond-shaped control right here.
It allows you to change the number of sides on the fly,
and you can go with as few as three sides,
although you can't really see the heads-up display
'cause the transform panel is in the way,
but let me show you that again.
So as few as three sides, because after all an
equilateral triangle is the simplest kind
of polygon there is.
Up to, these days, 11 sides.
But you can go with more sides than that just by
double-clicking on the round corner widget once again,
and manipulating this sides value.
All right, let's say I take it down to seven,
and here's another exciting tidbit for you.
I'll go ahead and drag one of these corner handles
independently of the other, so I'm not pressing
the Shift key in order to create a proportional re-size,
I'm just dragging the corner handle
by itself to kind of squish the shape.
And if I wanted to do so from the center,
I would go ahead and press the Alt key,
or the Opt key on the Mac, and I can even go ahead
and rotate that shape to some other angle, and yet
as we can see on the far-left side of the control panel,
Illustrator still recognizes it as a live polygon.
And so we can change the number of sides,
as well as adjust the corner roundness and so forth,
and we now have one additional option
in the form of this button, Make Sides Equal.
And if you click on that, you are going to restore
your regular polygon, at which point I could Shift + Alt,
or Shift + Opt drag a corner handle
in order to scale the shape proportionally
with respect to its center.
But bear in mind, all of these controls only show up
when you're seeing the bounding box, so
if you don't want them, just go ahead and choose
Hide Bounding Box, and all that folderol will disappear.
And that's how you take advantage of live polygons
here inside the latest version of Illustrator CC.