- [Instructor] All right, now what we've come up with
so far I think looks really cool,
but it's pretty darn simple to pull off,
because after all, we're just asking Illustrator
to take a circle and repeat it all over the place,
and we're making the program do all of the work for us.
What if you want to create
a conceptually more complex effect like this one right here,
and I should say that I was inspired to create this artwork
by a file that I found, and here's the ID number,
from the Dreamstime image library,
about which you can learn more and get some great deals
at dreamstime.com/deke.php,
but I will say that I recreated the artwork,
so I drew this from scratch,
just as you'll be drawing it from scratch along with me,
and it is a design that's been out there
for a very long time.
Now what you have to appreciate
when you're creating a pattern like this,
especially an absolutely seamless one,
which is what we have here, is that everything has to fit
inside a rectangular tile that repeats over and over again.
Now you might say to me, "Wait a sec, Deke.
"You just showed us a few movies ago,
"how you can create hexagonal tiles," and it's true.
Bricks and hexagons are things that Illustrator does for you
but in the background, everything gets boiled down
to a rectangle that is repeated in an absolute grid,
and to demonstrate what I mean,
I'll go ahead and switch over to this guy right here.
This is in fact a rectangular tile that Illustrator uses
to create this effect here,
and to demonstrate that that's the case,
I'll go ahead and repeat this tile manually.
So I'm zoom out here a little bit,
and then I'll grab this guy,
and I'll drag by the bottom-right corner
until it snaps into alignment up there
and then I'll press the alt key or the option key on the Mac
in order to duplicate it,
and now I'll drag this top-right point down like so
until it snaps into alignment, and I'll press the alt key
or the option key on the Mac once again.
Then I'll just go ahead and grab all these guys
with my black arrow tool, and I'll drag this point
over to the right, and I'll press the alt key
or the option key on the Mac to duplicate it,
and then I'll just go ahead and do the same
with this bottom right point, and I'll press the alt key
or the option on the Mac to duplicate it,
and you can see that indeed we have the hexagonal tile.
Notice that we've got this guy in the center
surrounded by six of his friends.
And so even though it looks like a hexagon,
it's actually a rectangular pattern tile.
All right, so if we're going to figure out something like this,
then at the very least, what we need to know
is the distance from the top of one crest
to the top of the next crest in the same wave,
and that is going to translate to the width
of our rectangular tile.
So what we need to do is a little bit of planning upfront,
which is why I came up with the wave diagram right here.
Now I'm the first to admit that I actually just plowed
my way through this project and figured it out
through trial and error, but I could have made things
work a lot more quickly, if I could have come up
with some numbers upfront, and if you know these numbers,
then my approach is going to make a lot more sense.
So I eventually figured out that the distance
from the top of one crest to the top of the next crest
on that same wave is 300 points, and it could be any number,
but 300 points works out very nicely,
which means that the distance from the top of one crest
to the valley of the next is half that distance
or 150 points.
Now notice that each one of these waves
is a kind of calligraphic brushstroke.
So we start thick, we get thinner,
and then we thicken up even more.
So at the apex, where the stroke is thickest,
I decided I wanted it to be about 10 points,
and that translates to seven points to the right,
and seven points down.
Now you may wonder how 10 points, down and to the right,
by the way, so we're moving one side to the next,
negative 45 degrees right there, you may wonder how
10 points translates to seven right and seven down.
Well, one way to figure that out is Pythagorean theorem,
which is some rudimentary algebra
that you probably learned back when you were
in middle school, or at the very least high school,
but not everyone knows that, and a lot of designers
absolutely hate math, and so another way
to figure this out is to make Illustrator
do the work for you.
Notice if I go ahead and just draw a rectangle,
and any old rectangle will do,
so I'll just go ahead and drop that guy right there,
and then I switch back to the black arrow tool.
If I press the enter key to bring up the Move dialog box,
I don't want to move it this far because that moves it
right off screen, but let's say I do want to move it
a distance of 10 points, and I want that angle to be
negative 45 degrees because negative 45 degrees,
as you can see inside this little widget, is down
and to the right.
Well then, Illustrator's actually going to tell you
that the distance to the right needs to be approximately
seven points and the distance down needs to be
approximately seven points as well,
but just to make things easier, I went with these guys
being absolutely seven and seven
and the distance value working out to be approximately 10.
Same with the distance from the top of one wave
to the top of the next.
I wanted it to be absolutely 20 points to the right
and 20 points down, and that translates to approximately
28 points, and to show you that is absolutely the truth,
I'll go ahead and enter a horizontal value of 20
and a vertical value of 20, and you can see
that our distance value is now approximately 28 points
at an angle of negative 45 degrees.
All right, so I'll just go ahead and cancel out
and I'll delete that rectangle as well.
All right, so with this basic information in mind,
we're going to start working on this seamlessly elaborate
and absolutely seamless pattern starting
in the next movie.