- In this movie, we'll take look at
one of the most obvious applications for
3D Insight Illustrator, and that's 3D Type.
It's worth noting that this type is entirely editable,
by the way, and we're controlling the color of
the extrusion using strokes.
We'll go ahead and switch over to this starter file.
And I'll click on this Line of Point text with my
black arrow tool, then I'll go up to the Effect menu,
choose 3D, and choose Extrude and Bevel.
And you can see if I turn on the Preview check box,
that just like that, we've got 3D type.
So it is very easy to create, however it
can be a little fragile.
So let's say I decide I want the text to be more or less
face-on, in which case I'll change the second two values,
the yaw, and the roll to zero degrees.
And then I'm going to pitch the text backward by
increasing this first X axis to 20 degrees like so.
Now everything works out fine when the Perspective value is
set to zero degrees, but let's say I take it up to
100 degrees, at which point we temporarily
see the wire frame outlines.
To get rid of those, I'll just click here inside the
Extrude depth value, and I'll take it up to 80 points.
I want you to notice that we're missing some extruded edges,
including the left side of this I,
the right sides of the E,
the left side of this I,
and the interior edge of the D.
And that is the function of setting both Yaw and Roll to
zero degrees, something Illustrator doesn't tend to like.
So, you've got to adjust one of them,
and I don't want to mess up the Roll value
because if I do...notice I'll just take it up to
10 degrees, you can see that I'm rolling the text in a
counterclockwise direction, not what I want,
so I'm going to set that back down to zero degrees,
at which point Illustrator actually ignores me for a
moment until I change the yaw value.
So, if I increase the value, notice that I now have
a roll of zero degrees, I can see that onscreen,
and I'm moving the right side of the text forward.
If I want to move the left side forward instead,
then I would enter a negative value.
Now notice that if I switch from negative one degree to
zero degrees that I'm not seeing a change onscreen,
and that's why I'm not losing my extruded edges,
but if I were to click "OK,"
and then I'll go ahead and switch over to the
Appearance Panel and click on
3D Extrude and Bevel to bring back the dialog box,
notice that my yaw value is once again negative one degree.
If I change it to zero degrees,
and then turn on the Preview checkbox,
then I'm missing some of those extruded edges.
So again, the way to deal with that
is to just change the yaw value,
in my case, I'm going to change it to negative one degree,
and that's going to slightly move the D,
that is the left side of the text, forward.
Alright, now at this point, I want to change
a few light settings,
so I'm going to set the ambient light value to zero degrees
just so that we have as much contrast as possible.
I'll take both the highlight intensity and
the highlight size values up to 100 percent,
and now notice if I move my light down and to the left,
then I'm no longer lighting the face of the letters.
I'm just lighting the bottom of the beveled edges.
That's not exactly what I want however,
so I'll just go ahead and move that light source
back up like so, and then I'll add a couple more by
clicking the little page icon,
and dragging this little guy down to the bottom of
the sphere, and then I'll click on the page icon again,
and drag this guy down and to the left to
produce this effect here.
Now you can see at this point if you look closely
that we've got some stair stepping along the side of the S
and the bottom of the O,
and you can smooth things out a bit by
increasing that Blend Steps value.
I've found at about 100 things look pretty good.
Alright, so at this point, I'll just go ahead
and click OK in order to accept those changes.
Now if you take another look at the Appearance panel,
you'll see that I've got a Fill and a couple of
Strokes, but only the Fill is turned on,
which is why both the face of the letters and the
extruded edges are shades of gray.
If I were to turn on this white stroke,
I'll brighten up the extruded edges dramatically,
and then if I were to turn on the red Stroke,
I'll wrap that white stroke in a red edge.
So, whatever color you assign as the
biggest, thickest stroke will be the
color assigned to the extruded edge of your
three dimensional text.
Now at this point you have to take a very close look at
your text because it's very possible you're going to
run into some problems.
Notice on the downright side of the D right here,
we have a broken edge.
That break occurs whether I'm working with the
white stroke or the red stroke.
So the trick is either to modify your
extrusion settings, so that's one option,
or you can increase your line weight.
So notice if I take the line weight up to nine points,
that's not really doing any good.
So I'll take it up to ten, at which point we
still have that problem,
but you just got to keep an eye out on your text because
notice over here on the far right side,
we've lost the face to the N.
So, if I were to take the line weight value back to
nine points, the N comes back,
and then when I take it up to ten points, it disappears.
That's not just a screen thing, by the way.
That is how the text is going to print
and how it's going to export, so you need to be careful.
In any case, I'm going to keep taking that
line weight value back up.
Notice at 11 points, we get the N back.
And then, at 13 points, we still have that weird line
in the bottom right corner of the D,
but as soon as I take the line weight up to 14 points,
it disappears, and we end up with a very smooth effect.
Alright, now I'm going to click on the word Type
up here at the top of the Appearance panel.
What I want to do at this point is bend the letters
in order to create this final effect here.
I'm going to do that using an arch effect.
So I'll go ahead and switch back to my type so far,
and with the text selected, we'll go up to
the Effect menu, choose Warp, and choose Arch.
Then I'll make sure that the Horizontal Radio button is
selected, and I'll set the Bend value to 10 percent,
and click OK.
Now notice we have a different problem,
so I'm going to go ahead and zoom in here,
at which point we can see these dark red bars
that are surrounding these bits of light red
down here at the bottom of all the letters.
Now one way to mitigate this effect would be to
grab the arch effect and drag it down the list to
below 3D Extrude and Bevel.
That way, it gets applied after the 3D Effect.
That does, however slightly change the bend of the letters
and it doesn't entirely take care of our problem.
Notice we've still got a weird edge
down here at the base of the S.
Now we've got a problem up here at the top of the S as well.
The better solution is to click on the word Stroke,
specifically the one for the outside stroke,
the red stroke that is to say, and then you
want to change the corner setting to round join.
Notice as soon as you do that you'll go ahead
and smooth off those transitions like so,
and we even end up getting a little bit of a
reflective bounce.
Not really what I want, however,
so I'm going to grab that arch once again,
and drag it to the top of the stack.
You don't want to drop it on the Fill because then,
you would just be arching the fill and not the strokes.
In which case, just drag it even farther up so that it's
sitting right below the word Type,
at which point we get a very smooth effect.
So once again, here's the difference.
I'll click on the word Stroke, and change the corner
back to minor join, at which point we end up getting
these harsh transitions.
Compare that to the smooth effects we get with the
round join, or you can even experiment with a
bevel join if you like.
However, I'm going to stick with the round join,
so I'll go ahead and select that option,
and then I'll press Control-Shift-A or
Command-Shift-A on a Mac to deselect my text,
and I'll go ahead and zoom out as well.
Finally, just to demonstrate that this is indeed
live, editable type, I'll go ahead and double click
someplace inside the text in order to automatically
switch over to the Type tool.
I'll change these first three letters like so,
and notice just by virtue of the fact that I edited the
text, I end up with an invisible T right here,
but as soon as I spell the word correctly,
by changing this S to a T, I end up filling in
that other letter, and that folks,
is at least one way to create live,
editable 3D text here inside Illustrator.