- In this movie, just for fun,
I'll show you how to combine a dotted outline
along with a circle to create this quick and dirty gear.
But the thing about this gear is that it's perfect
in that it has exactly 20 equally sized teeth,
as well as 20 equally sized grooves.
So the first step is to go ahead and create a circle
and I'll do that by selecting the Ellipse tool
from the Shape tool fly out menu.
And then I want you to position your cursor
on the intersection of those two guidelines.
Press the alt key or the option key on the Mac
and drag outwards.
And then as you're dragging, go ahead and add the shift key
as well, so that you have both the shift and alt keys down.
Those would be the shift and option keys on the Mac
until you see a width and height value of 500 pt each,
at which point you can go ahead and release
in order to create that circle.
All right, now I want to assign a fill to the path,
and so I'll click on the first swatch up here
in the control panel and I'll select black.
And then I'll also change the stroke to white,
just so we have a lot of contrast here,
by clicking on the second swatch
and choosing white from the pop-up panel.
All right, now I'm going to change the line weight to 50 pt,
so that we have some big huge dots.
Problem is they're packed too closely together.
So I'll click on the word Stroke,
and I'll drop down to the gap value,
and I'll pres shift + up arrow
in order to move those circles apart,
until I get a value of 70 points like so.
Now for whatever reason,
Illustrator has gone ahead and selected the first icon,
that is, it's preserving the exact dash and gap links.
And as a result, we have a couple of dots
overlapping each other.
I can solve that problem by clicking on the line icon,
but that's not necessarily going to give me
the effect I want.
I am seeing a circle right at this location here
on the right-hand side, but I want to see
a groove aligned the top of the shape,
as well as exactly aligned, not nearly aligned,
with this left-hand point and exactly aligned
with the bottom as well, as we're seeing
in the final version of the gear.
And that means I need to be more specific
about that gap value.
And so let's say I want a total of 20 grooves
around the entire circle.
And the reason 20 is a great number
is because the circle is divided into four quadrants,
at least where these anchor points are concerned.
And 20 is divisible by four, so you can go 16 or 12
or something like that instead,
but I'm going to go with 20.
Now the thing is, in order to figure out exactly
what this gap value needs to be,
I need to figure out the circumference of this circle,
and that means I've got to engage in a little bit of math,
and not the easy kind of arithmetic math,
but the fairly scary kind of geometry math.
And in fact, any time you're trying to figure out a circle,
you've got to engage with pi.
And specifically, the equation we're looking for
is C, which is the circumference,
equals two times pi times r.
And r is the radius by the way,
which is half of the diameter.
So right now, we have a circle with a 500 pt diameter.
That means it has a 250 pt radius.
Now this might be pretty darn daunting
and you may have already stopped the movie for all I know,
but fortunately, there's this thing called the Internet
that does math for you.
And so I'm going to go ahead and switch over
to a web browser.
And notice that I've done a search
for a circumference calculator.
For this one, I just need to enter the radius of the circle
and so I'm going to click inside this field
and enter half of that diameter, which is 250,
and I don't even care if it's points or what the units are.
All I have to do is enter 250
and then click on the Calculate button,
and I get this insane number here,
which is 1570.796,
is good enough.
We can rule out the rest of those digits.
So I'll just go ahead and write that number down
on a piece of paper and then I'll switch back over
to Illustrator.
I'll return to my illustration in progress right here,
and I'll click on the word Stroke
in order to bring up that Stroke panel,
and I'm going to change the gap value
to that circumference number that we just figured out,
1570.796.
And instead of leaving it at that value,
which actually wouldn't work, because currently,
the maximum gap value is 1000 points.
I'm going to enter /20,
so I'm going to divide that value,
the entire perimeter of the circle,
we're going to divide it by 20
because that's how many grooves we want.
At which point, I'll press the enter key,
or the return key on the Mac,
in order to apply that change.
And you can see that we now have exactly
one, two, three, four, five grooves
per quadrant, or a total of 20 grooves in all.
And we have now done our math so impeccably
that it doesn't matter which of the alignment icons
we click on here inside the Stroke panel.
You can either click on preserve exact values,
or click on align, and you'll get the exact same result.
All right, now we need to take advantage
of a couple of commands that we haven't seen before.
First, you go up to the Object menu,
choose Path and then choose Outline Stroke.
And that will draw path outlines around all the strokes
as we're seeing here.
And now I want to subtract those white circles
from the big black circle,
and the easiest way to do that is to go to the Window menu
and choose the Pathfinder command,
which will bring up the Pathfinder panel,
and this panel is so great that I devote an entire chapter
to it in the advanced course.
But for now, just go ahead and click on the second icon
in the first row, Minus Front.
And that will subtract the white circles away.
All right, now we need to carve a circle out of the center
of the gear, and we'll do that, once again,
using the Ellipse tool.
And so I'll go ahead and press the alt key,
or the option key on the Mac,
and drag out from the center,
while pressing the shift key as well,
so I've got both the shift and alt keys down,
that's shift and option on the Mac,
until I get width and height values of 300 pt.
And now, to carve that circle out of the gear,
go ahead and switch back to the Black Arrow tool,
which you can get by pressing the V key,
partially marquee those shapes,
but don't marquee the center because you'll end up
selecting that rectangle from the previous movie.
And then go to the Object menu, choose Compound Path
and choose Make, and that'll cut that circle
out of the center.
All right, now I want to create a copy of it
by pressing ctrl + c, ctrl + f,
that would be cmd + c, cmd + f on the Mac,
and you can see that we now have a duplicate.
Go and put it back where it was though.
And now I'll click on the fill swatch
up here in the control panel,
and I'll select this brighter orange,
which is R=251 G=176 B=59.
And now I'll set the line weight to 4 pt.
For some reason, that gives me a white stroke,
which is, of course, not what I want,
so I'll go ahead and click on that white swatch right there
and I'll change it to black in order to produce this effect.
All right, now I'll press shift + up arrow,
shift + right arrow in order to offset that gear
up into the right.
And then I'll marquee both the gear and its shadow
and press shift + down arrow, shift + left arrow
in order to put them back where they belong.
And now I'll click off the shapes in order to deselect them,
and I'll turn off the guides layer
so that we can see the gear and its dotted outline
all by themselves.
And that's how you combine a dotted outline with a circle
to create a quick and dirty gear here inside illustrator.