- [Instructor] Now as I've mentioned,
possibly the biggest downside to 3D in Illustrator
is that the various 3D objects
can't interact with each other.
Which is why I want to take a moment
to show you at least one way to create
a plausible cast shadow effect,
in which these letters are casting a shadow
onto the background,
that doesn't involve a traditional drop shadow,
and here's why.
Let's say I switch over to my letters so far,
and then click on 'em with the black arrow tool
to select them, and then go up to the Effect menu,
choose Stylize, and choose Drop Shadow.
Now I'm going to leave the opacity value
set to 75%, that's just fine.
I'll set the X offset value to zero points.
I'll change the Y offset to 30 points,
and then I'll raise the blur value to eight points.
My color is black, at which point
if I turn on the preview checkbox,
you can see that I get this big blob of a drop shadow,
at which point I'll click OK.
Now, the reason that this is such a problem
is that there's no way the lights
that we've assigned to the text
would cast the shadow that we're seeing here.
It's way too big, notice that it's reaching
the very end of the letter A,
as well as beyond the end of the letter N.
Rather, we'd have something smaller,
as we're seeing right here,
and the shadow would not only go downward,
but it would go up as well,
because one of our lights is coming in from up right,
and the other two are coming in from down left.
And so what's a different way to work?
Well, the first thing we want to do
is select this drop shadow that I just applied
and get rid of it by clicking on the little trash icon.
And then we want to make a copy of this text
by pressing Control C, or Command C on a Mac.
Alright, we'll come back to that copy in a moment,
but for now I'm going to select both of the strokes.
So I'll click on one and shift click on the other
here in the Appearance panel,
and I'll click on the trash can icon,
in the bottom right corner to get rid of 'em.
Now, we still want to work from these 3D letters
but we want them to be flat,
so I'm going to click on 3D Extrude and Bevel,
to bring up the dialogue box.
I'll turn on the preview checkbox,
and I'm going to change the surface
from plastic shading to no shading,
so that we have just a bunch of flat letters.
And even though in an earlier movie
I was questioning if you'd ever
find a use for this function,
I think maybe I have because it's going to allow us
to match the shadow to the letters in the foreground.
Alright, now I'll click OK to accept that change
and I'll also click on the fill right here
in order to make it active, and I'll set it to black,
so that we have these big black letters.
Alright, now I'll bring back that copied text
by pressing Control F or Command F on a Mac,
in order to paste it in the foreground,
and then I'll go up to the Object menu,
choose Lock, and choose Selection.
Or you've got that shortcut of Control 2,
or Command 2 on a Mac, just to protect those letters.
But it's also going to allow us to click
on the letters in order to select the shadow text.
Alright now, I'll click on the word Type
here in the Appearance panel,
and then I'll go up to the Effect menu,
choose Distort and Transform,
and choose the Transform command,
or if you love to D-key,
you've got that shortcut of Control E
here on the PC, or Command E on the Mac.
And now, I'll turn on the preview checkbox,
so I can see what I'm doing.
I'll click in the vertical move value
and I'll press shift up arrow a total of three times
to move that black text downward.
Now at this point, it's just as big
as the text in the foreground
so it's behaving like a traditional drop shadow.
To make it smaller, I'll click
in the horizontal scale value,
and I'll take it down all the way to 84%,
and that way it's forming a straight line.
So notice the base of the black end
is forming a straight line
with the base of the red letters,
and it's happening over here with the A as well.
And then if you wanted to, of course,
you could move the shadow around horizontally as well,
in order to better reflect the light sources,
but I figured this was good enough
and so I'll go ahead and click OK to accept that change.
Now, I'll return to the Effect menu,
drop down to Blur, and then choose Gaussian Blur.
And I'll set the radius to eight pixels,
that was the same radius I had for the drop shadow,
and so if I turn on the preview checkbox
you can see that we get a nice shadow effect.
Alright, now I'll click OK,
and at this point I want to add another shadow
that's going upward and so I'll return to the Effect menu,
choose Distort and Transform,
and once again choose the Transform command.
I do want to apply a new effect
so I'll click on that button,
and then I'll turn on the preview checkbox,
and I will click in the vertical move value once again
and this time I'll press shift down arrow
a bunch of times until I get a value of negative 50 points,
and then I'll set the copies value to one,
so that we have two shadows,
one going downward and another going upward,
at which point I'll click OK.
And finally I'll reduce the opacity
of the effect to 50%, and if you love to D-key
you can do that just by tapping the five key.
Or of course, if not,
you can change the opacity value
up here in the control panel,
at which point we end up with this effect here.
And that's it, we'll just go ahead
and press Control Shift A, or Command Shift A on a Mac
in order to deselect the text.
And that is at least one way
to create a plausible cast shadow
behind your 3D text or other object
here inside Illustrator.