- [Instructor] In this movie, I'll show you how a create
a new pattern from an existing one.
Actually, I'll show you how to create two new patterns
from existing ones, and in two different ways,
and this can be useful when you want to refine a pattern
without ruining the original, which is a great way to work
by the way.
Your future self will thank you later.
All right, so as any 2001 aficionado knows,
this drawing of HAL is bogus.
The pupil of his eye shouldn't be white.
It should be yellow.
Plus, we need to add these additional reflections.
So I'll go ahead and switch back to my file at hand,
and I'm going to turn off the pattern layer for a moment
and zoom on in on the eye that I've drawn so far,
and you might as well make all of your modifications here
inside the actual illustration, that way,
you'll still have all of your live effects,
because as you'll see, when we paste these effects
into the pattern, they end up getting rasterized.
All right, so I'll go ahead and select this central pupil
right here, the aperture of the camera that is the eye,
and I'll go to the Window menu and choose Gradient
in order to bring up the Gradient panel,
and I'll twirl this guy open.
Make sure that the fill is active,
and then go up to your Swatches panel
and drag RGB yellow all the way down to the far right side
of this gradient ramp, so that we're creating a white
to yellow gradient.
All right, currently this is a linear gradient,
which is not what we want, so I'll change the type
from Linear to Radial, and now I want to go ahead
and change the location of this yellow color stop,
so I'll make sure it's selected,
then I'll change the location value to 50%
and I'll press the enter key or the return key on the Mac,
and that's going to seem like a pretty subtle effect
until I press control + h, or command + h on the Mac,
to hide the selection edges, and you can see that we have
just a little bit of whiteness right there at the center,
which is, for what it's worth, the way it is in the movie.
All right, now I'll unhide the edges by pressing control + h
or command + h again, and I'll press control + c
or command + c on the Mac in order to copy that circle.
All right, now what we want to do
is modify this pattern swatch,
but you don't want to click on it right now
because if you do, you'll end up filling that little circle
with the pattern, which as a result of the alignment,
is kind of duplicating this area right here into the circle.
Of course, that's not what we want,
so I'll press control + z, or command + z on the Mac,
to undo that change, and I'll press control + shift + a,
or command + shift + a on the Mac, to make sure
nothing is selected, that's very important,
and then go ahead and double-click on this pattern swatch
in order to enter the pattern-editing mode.
All right, now go ahead and click on the existing pupil
and you'll see this big rectangle which is showing you
that the pupil has been rasterized.
It's showing up as a group over here on the left side
of the control panel, but if you were to ungroup it
by going to the Object menu and choosing Ungroup,
then you would see that it's an image,
and if you were to click on the word Image,
you would see this icon over here that indicates
its an embedded image as opposed to a linked one.
Whatever, it's a pixel-based image which isn't something
that you can edit very effectively inside Illustrator.
So I'm just going to press the backspace key
or the delete key on the Mac to get rid of it,
and then I'll press control + f, or command + f on the Mac,
in order to paste this guy in front, and notice currently,
this is a vector-based path outline.
In fact, the left side of the control panel is telling us
that it's an ellipse, and if I were to bring up
the Appearance panel, and forgive me for a second,
I'm just going to make a little more room by switching
to the Stroke panel there.
Then I'll switch over to the Appearance panel
and you can see that we have this live effect,
Gaussian blur.
The thing is, that's not going to stick over time,
and we'll see that happen in just a moment, but first,
I'm going to switch to the outline mode,
by going up to the View menu and choosing Outline,
or of course you can press control + y,
or command + y on the Mac, and the reason I'm doing this
is to demonstrate that this guy is off-center.
Even though I pressed control + f, or command + f on the Mac
in order to paste it in the front, it didn't work,
and that's because the pattern and the illustration
aren't necessarily exactly aligned with each other,
and so I'm just going to drag this guy by its center point
so it snaps into alignment with the center of the rest
of the circles, and then I'll press control + y
or command + y on the Mac to switch back to the preview mode
and I might as well zoom out a little bit
so that we can take in more of the eyes.
All right, now if you were to just escape out,
then you would save over the original HAL pattern,
but let's say that's not what I want to do.
I want to essentially perform a Save As.
Then you would go up to this button right here
called Save a Copy, and click on it,
and go ahead and name this guy HAL 2, let's say,
and click OK, after which point,
you're going to see a couple of important alert messages.
Now first you're going to see this one
that tells you that some special kinds of objects
are going to be expanded, including symbols, effects,
which we have here, the Gaussian blur effect,
plugin groups, whatever those are, nested patterns,
so patterns inside of other patterns,
strokes that are aligned inside or outside of a path outline
so all your strokes have to centered, or graphs,
which we'll see in a future chapter.
Now that list doesn't quite include everything.
As you may recall from the previous movie,
blends and gradient strokes are also expanded.
All right, so this is just something important
to bear in mind.
You could say Don't Show Again, but I wouldn't
because this is an important message.
I would just go ahead and click OK, after which point,
we're going to see an even more remarkable message
in my opinion, that's telling you a pattern has been added
to the Swatches panel, fine, there it is, but also,
any additional changes made
while in the pattern-editing mode will be applied
to the original pattern, not to the copy.
This is very important, so go ahead and click OK.
Notice here in the Pattern Options panel
that we're still working on the original HAL pattern
and it now has yellow pupils as you can see
inside this preview, and so if I were to just click Done
or press the escape key, then I would end up
overriding the original pattern, which is not what I want,
so instead what you want to do is click Cancel,
and believe it or not that's going to do exactly what you want.
So notice if I switch back to the Layers panel
and turn on the pattern layer like so,
that big rectangle is not affected and that's because
it's still linked to the original pattern.
If you want to update it, then go ahead and click on it
to select it, and then, with the fill active,
select HAL 2 here in the Swatches panel,
and you will see all those pupils turn yellow.
All right, so that's one way to create a new pattern
based on an existing one but there's actually a better way
to work, as I'll show you in the next movie.