- [Instructor] In this movie we're going to take on,
what I believe is, the most ambitious project
I've ever attempted in an one on one course,
and that is this car, which includes
nearly a dozen mesh objects.
Now, if you're working along with me,
you may notice some onscreen idiosyncrasies,
such as these white lines, or whatever they are,
over here next to the gas cap,
as well as next to the rear door,
and underneath both of the wheels.
Now, if you zoom in,
then some of those problems may go away,
and others may become worse.
But, they're not really there,
and to demonstrate what I'm talking about,
I went to the file menu, chose export,
and then chose export as,
and exported this as a tif image,
which I will now open up inside Photoshop.
And, you can see that everything is looking super smooth,
with none of those white lines, whatsoever.
And, with any luck, that should be the way
it prints, as well.
Alright, I'm going to switch back to Illustrator,
and we're going to start off
inside this illustration, right here.
Now, the reason I'm crediting Dreamstime
is because of the tracing template.
And so, I'll just go ahead and turn off
these layers, right here.
And, you can see I've got this photographic image
that I traced with just a ton of path outlines
here inside Illustrator.
Now, also worth noting, is that this project
is complicated enough the way it is, here.
So, I decided to limit my pallet to just four global colors,
which we're seeing in this car colors group here
in the swatches panel.
And, just in case you don't have access to this file,
these are the HSB values.
So, the hue value's 220 degrees, for all four colors,
and then in the second column,
we're seeing the saturation values,
and in this third, we're seeing the brightness values.
Just in case, you have any desire to get similar results.
Alright, I'm going to go ahead
and grab this layer, right here, URL and colors.
And, I'll drag it and drop it
onto the trash icon to get rid of it.
Now, we're going to start things off
in this movie, by shading the rear view mirror.
So, I'll go ahead and zoom in on it, like so.
And if you like, you can just click on it,
but bear in mind if you selected that checkbox,
inside the preferences dialogue box,
this guy right here, object selection by path only,
then you're not going to be able to click inside
the path to select it.
Instead you're going to have to click
on the outline of the path,
and then just go ahead and press control plus,
or command plus, on the Mac,
a couple of times, to zoom in.
Now notice, if I go up to the object menu,
create gradient mesh is dimmed,
and that's because it's not applicable
to this specific kind of object.
Which, as we can see, over here in the far left side
of the control panel, is a compound shape.
And, what that means is we're going to have
to turn a few of these paths into static path outlines.
Now, the best thing to do in that case,
before you turn anything into a mesh object,
is to make a copy of all those special objects.
And, we're going to do that by selecting the path's layer,
here inside the layers panel.
Then you want to click on the flyout menu icon,
and choose duplicate paths,
which is going to duplicate the entire paths layer.
Go ahead and turn off the original,
so you don't mess it up,
and then double click on an empty portion
of this new layer.
Let's go ahead and rename it, meshes,
and then change the color to gold,
just because it's going to show up well
against these blue path outlines.
Alright, now what you want to do
is go up to the window menu,
and chose the path finder command,
to bring up the path finder panel.
Now, with any luck the expand button will be available.
If it's not, just click off the path,
and then reselect it, by clicking on its outline,
at which point the expand button should become available,
in which case, go ahead and click on it.
Alright, having done that,
I'll go ahead and hide the path finder panel.
You should see the word path on the far left side
of the control panel, incidentally.
And, that'll tell you that you can convert
this into a mesh object my going up to the object menu
and choosing create gradient mesh, if you like.
And then, with the preview check box turned on,
I'll just go ahead and take the rows value down to three,
and that's going to give us two row lines.
And, then I'll tab to the columns value,
and I'll take it down to four,
so that we have three column lines, like so.
At least, that's one way to work.
That's not actually the way I want to work, however,
because it's spacing all those line equidistant
from each other, so I'm just going to cancel out.
And, then I'll grab my mesh tool,
which tends to be the more flexible approach,
and you can get it incidentally by pressing the U key.
And now, I'll click to create a new row, right about here.
Make sure that you're seeing
a plus sign next to your cursor,
and that'll show you that you're creating
a new row, like so.
And now, I'll drop down to right about here,
where the bottom path intersects
the rear view mirror, and I'll click.
And, if you end up getting this effect,
where you select the wrong object,
then just press control Z, or command Z on the Mac
to undue that change.
This guy is already filled with the standard gradient,
so we don't want to mess it up,
which is why I'm going to switch to the isolation mode,
which you can do by double clicking
on the path outline with the black arrow tool.
Or, if you don't want to leave the mesh tool,
then go up to this icon right here,
isolate selected object, and click on it,
and that'll isolate this guy, like so.
Alright, now click right about here, let's say,
in order to create a second row,
and now I want to create a few columns,
by clicking up here at the top,
and then clicking over here,
at this location, and then finally
I think I'll click over here, like so,
and you may find that to be a little hard
because there's that control handle in the way.
In which case, drop down to the bottom of the path outline,
and click right about here, let's say.
Alright now, this path was already filled
with this guy right here, blue one,
and just to make sure that's the case,
I'll select my fill attribute here, in the swatches panel,
and I'll click the blue one swatch.
Alright now, let's add a few highlights,
by pressing the A key, to get the wide arrow tool,
and then I'll click on this guy, let's say,
and then shift click on these two,
and I'm going to change them to blue three,
which will lighten up things nicely.
And then, I'll select this point,
and I'll change it to blue four,
which is the lightest of those swatches.
Alright, now notice if I press the V key,
to switch back to black arrow tool,
and I click off the path to deselect it,
I have once again lost my stroke,
just as we've seen in previous movies.
To get it back, I'll go up to the window menu
and choose the appearance command,
in order to bring up the appearance panel,
and then I'll click on that path outline,
to select it once again.
I'll drop down to the add new stroke icon
in the bottom left corner of the appearance panel,
or you can press that keyboard shortcut,
control alt slash, or command option slash on the Mac.
A one point line weight is fine,
but I want the color of the strobe to be black,
which it isn't currently.
It's a kind of weak black,
in which point we'll end up with this effect here.
Alright, now that I'm done,
I'll just press the escape key,
in order to exit the isolation mode,
and by the way, you can tell you're working
in the isolation mode, if I go ahead and double click
on the path outline, once again.
Not only because all the other objects are dimmed,
but also because we're seeing this path up here,
in the top left corner of the window.
And so, notice we're working on the meshes layer,
that's what that means,
and we're working on this mesh object.
And so, you can either back out,
by clicking on this right pointing arrow head,
or again, you can just press the escape key.
After which, I'll go ahead
and click off the path to deselect it.
And again, you don't need to worry
about those white artifacts.
But, we do need to worry about this miter joint.
I'm not interested in it, so I'll go ahead
and select the path outline, and then I'll click
on the word stroke here in the appearance panel,
and I'll change the corner to round join,
and then I'll go ahead and round off that corner.
And then, I'll click off the path to deselect it.
And, that's how you add shading with gradient mesh
in order to create a volume metric object,
as well as how you isolate a mesh object,
here inside Illustrator.