- [Instructor] In this movie we'll create
this translucent windshield.
And we'll do so by converting a standard linear gradient
into a gradient mesh.
And so I want you to notice something.
If I select the windshield which,
if you're working along with me,
you'll need to do by clicking on the top edge.
If you click down here on the bottom edge
you'll select the hood instead
because the hood is in front.
In any event, I'll select the windshield
and I'll move it out of the way.
And you can see that reveals the interior of the car,
which is all found on this layer called interior.
And so I suppose one option would be to press Control Z,
or Command + Z on the Mac, to undo that move.
And now I'll zoom in here.
One option would be to click on the word opacity here
and change the blend mode to screen
which is just going to produce the same effect
as shining light on that windshield.
And that will let us see through to the interior of the car.
The problem is we still very obviously
have a linear gradient.
Now albeit, this gradient happens to contain
quite a few colors.
And if you want to see what those are,
you can select the gradient tool,
which you can also get by pressing the G key.
And then go ahead and hover over the gradient annotator
and you can see that we've got this sort of dull orange
that transitions into green, back to orange,
then to a kind of sky blue and, ultimately, to white.
So I want you to see that we have a total
of five colors in all, which is going to translate
to three row lines, incidentally.
One at the green location, one at the orange location,
and one at blue.
Alright, so let's see what that looks like.
I'll go ahead and press the V key
to switch back to my black arrow tool.
And I'll undo the change to the blend mode
so that we, once again, have an opaque windshield.
Next, what you want to do is go to the object menu
and not choose create gradient mesh.
If you do that, you'll just replace
all those colors with black, which is obviously
not what we want.
So I'll cancel out.
Instead, you want to return to the object menu
and choose the Expand command.
And notice that you can expand the gradient
either to objects.
So for example, if I were to select Specify
and it said to 255 by default, then I will end up
with 255 very narrow rotated rectangles
inside of a clipping mask,
which is not what I'm looking for,
instead, I want a gradient mesh.
Now, we only need to expand the fill, not the stroke,
so go ahead and turn off the stroke checkbox
and then click OK.
And you'll see the colors shift ever so slightly.
So, notice, this is before,
this is the original linear gradient,
which has some very obvious bands of color in it,
and this is the smoother effect we get by converting
the linear gradient to a gradient mesh.
Now, if you were to go over to the layers panel
and twirl open the meshes layer,
you would see that we have this object called windshield.
And notice over here on the far left side
of the control panel that it's a group.
We do not need that group.
In fact, it's going to get in our way,
so go to the object menu and choose the Ungroup command
or press control shift G or command shift G on a Mac.
Now notice that we have a clipping group right here
and we have this path outline and this path right there
is just the stroke.
Notice that if I drag it to a different location,
we have a stroke with no fill, in other words,
this is a useless object to us,
so I'll press the backspace key or the delete key on a Mac
to get rid of it and then I'll twirl open
the clipping group and if you look very closely up here
at the top of the windshield, you'll see
that we're only getting half a stroke and, in fact,
we really don't have any stroke at all,
we're just revealing half of the stroke
from the larger body object in the background.
So, I'll undo that move
and I will target this path which is the clipping mask
here inside the expanded clipping group
and then I'll click on the second color swatch
up here in the control panel
and I'll select black and that will automatically
give me a line weight of one point
which is exactly what I'm looking for.
Alright, now I'll deselect the object for a moment
and I'll zoom out and then I'll target this item right here,
the second item inside the clipping group,
and that is the gradient mesh object itself,
you can see that by the word Mesh over here
on the far left side of the control panel
and it's actually a rectangle masked inside the shape
of the windshield.
Alright, now I'll go ahead and zoom in on this object
and we're going to be modifying a few colors
from the color panel and so if you're not seeing the panel,
you can go to the Window menu and choose the color command.
You also want to make sure that it's fully expanded,
so that you can see the slider bars and I've got the sliders
set to HSB that is hue saturation and brightness.
Now, I don't want what just happened to happen,
I just got done filling the entire mesh with white
and so I'll press control Z or command Z on a Mac
to undo that change.
Alright, now we're going to modify a few points here
by pressing the A key to get the white arrow tool
and then I'll go ahead and select this bottom left point
and you can see that the hue is already set in advance
to 50 degrees, the saturation's approximately 30%,
and the brightness value is 80% and the reason that we have
these decimal values is because this is the closest
Illustrator can come in the RGB color space.
But just to make it a little easier to follow along,
I've gone ahead and listed the HSB values for each one
of the mesh points here inside this Photoshop file.
So, I just throw it up on screen
so you have a chance to see it.
I'll go ahead and switch back to Illustrator
and notice that the bottom right point, if I click on it,
is set to those very same HSB values
and that's because this was the first color stop
in the linear gradient, so it actually starts down here
at the bottom and goes up to the top.
And so, at least so far, we're not really changing
any colors here.
I'll go ahead and click on this mesh point.
Notice that it's HSB values are 120, 20, and 50 respectively
which is just fine, the same goes for this mesh point
down right and that's because this entire row
corresponds to the second color stop
in that linear gradient.
Now, the only change I want to make to this mesh point
is to reduce the opacity value and so notice
if I click on the word opacity up here,
I can't change the blend mode, not for a single mesh point,
but I can dial in a different opacity value if I like
and so I'm going to take that opacity value down to 80%.
Alright, now I'll select this guy and his HSB values
are 50, 30, 80, which is just what I want.
I do, however, want to reduce the opacity to 60%
and because I've a lot of D keys,
I can do that just by tapping the six key.
So, those D key shortcuts are going to work
even when you're adjusting mesh points.
Now I'll select this guy and I'm going to dial in
some different values.
I'm going to set the hue value to 30 degrees
which is going to create a little bit of orange down here
at this location and so notice we now have something
we couldn't pull off with a linear gradient.
We have not only colors transitioning vertically
but horizontally as well
and I'll set the saturation value to 30%,
that's pretty much where it is already,
and I'll set the brightness value to 60%
to produce this effect here.
Alright, now I'll select this mesh point.
Its colors are just fine here in the color panel
but I do want to reduce the opacity value to 70%
and so again because I loaded D keys,
I'll just press the seven key
and then I'll select this guy right here
and this is going to be a pretty modest edit
but I'm going to take the brightness value down
from 100% to 80% like so
and that will dim down the colors in that corner.
Alright, so I could stick with what are essentially
a bunch of horizontal rows but as long as I'm working
with the gradient mesh, I might as well bend these
segments a little bit and so I decided to take these guys up
like so and then I clicked on this segment
and drag these control handles.
Notice that you can't drag a segment directly
when you're working with mesh objects,
you have to go ahead and move the control handles.
Alright, that takes care of all of the modifications
to the actual mesh itself and so now I'll just go ahead
and press the V key to switch to my black arrow tool
and I'll click on the windshield
and that goes ahead and selects the entire clipping group
after which point I'll click the word opacity
up here in the control panel
and I'll change the blend mode for the entire object
to screen in order to produce this effect right here
and now I'll deselect the windshield,
I'll press control zero or command zero on a Mac
to zoom out, I'll go ahead and twirl the meshes layer closed
and I'll scroll down to the bottom of the layers panel
and I'll turn on this layer of white
which is designed to cover up the tracing template
and that's just going to give us a cleaner look
where these background windows are concerned.
And that's how you turn a linear gradient
which can look pretty darn fakey at times
into a luminous translucent gradient mesh
here inside Illustrator.