hello and welcome to this video tutorial today we're looking at the new 3d tools
in adobe illustrator and some of the problems associated with using them so i have a brand new
document here on the screen with some 3d objects these two 3d objects here are created using the
old tools in adobe illustrator which are still available and these are created using the new
tools and while it might look like this is really really spectacular it's got a whole lot of issues
that it brings to the party so firstly let's look at things like where is the new tool and where are
the old tools if you go to window and then 3d and materials you're going to get the new panel
but if you want to continue to use the old 3d effects you can still do so they're available
here through the effect menu you'll go to 3d and materials and go down to 3d classic where you'll
find your extrude and bevel revolve and rotate classic options so just be aware that just because
they're not available on this window menu you've still got all the old tools available to you
you've also got them available to you at the foot of the appearance panel so if you had a
shape selected you could come down here and choose fx and then 3d materials and
you get access to all your classic features so it's important to be aware that you can still
use the old tools as well as the new ones now one of the really big differences we're going
to see when we actually create a 3d circle like this or 3d sphere like this in a minute
is that the results of using these two are different well obviously we're getting a
very different result on a half sphere and this one looks really good this one doesn't look very
good at all this is a sphere created from half a circle using the old tool and this is the new one
the old tool makes it much easier to add materials to your shape and also when you expand it you get
a actual set of vector shapes when you use the new tool you don't you're just getting an image
and so if you want to be able to get access to the elements that make up a 3d object you're going to
have to continue to use the old tool the new one as i said it just gives you an image so it just
makes everything rasterized the other thing with the new tool is that it uses up a lot of
processing power i have a brand new really well configured machine and i can hear the fan running
when i'm doing some of the 3d shapes so you want to be working on really small shapes or you could
easily crash your computer obviously you should have everything closed that you don't need to have
open if you are working with the new 3d tools and if your computer is struggling
so now that we can see how things look in the old and the new versions i'm actually just going
to turn these 3d effects off so you can see that the two starting shapes were identical
the new version gives us this effect and this is about the best i can do with the old version
again these are both the same starting shape
i get different results with the new tool and the old one but the new one is not necessarily better
let's close this down and have a look at creating a 3d shape using the new tools
so i have a circle here it has no stroke it does have a fill
i'm working on a document that is a thousand pixels by a thousand pixels
so this particular object is 444 by 444 that's still pretty big for this new 3d
effect i'm going to select over this anchor point here and delete it so i have half a circle
i'll select my shape and we're going to apply the new 3d effect so i'll go to window
3d and materials so this is our new panel i'm going to start with object here and i'm going
to use revolve which is what you would typically use to create a sphere and this is exactly what
would have happened in the old tool so not that anything's going wrong here it's just that our
offset direction is set to left edge let's make it right edge and we get a sphere so we can
change the revolve angle so if you don't want it to revolve quite so much you can change that and
there is also an offset for creating things like donuts but we're going to make a sphere
you get a number of rotation presets this panel can be opened and closed by just clicking its
disclosure triangle here i'm using off axis front right now but you can change to off axis back
or any of these other options you have isometric options as well and they can be customized by just
selecting your own settings here let's go back and just do front that'll do for now
this setting is going to have a lot more of an effect on other shapes for the sphere that we're
creating basically we're just getting a sphere and it's looking pretty much the same regardless
of what settings we're using in materials we can set the material so you've got a whole lot
of materials you can use here i'm just going to settle with this color but you can experiment
with materials what i do want to look at down here is the base properties so you can open that
again with its disclosure triangle and you get a roughness so i'm going to set the roughness
way down low so this is going to get a more shiny look but as you can see it doesn't look shiny
at all right now well that's because it hasn't been rendered so i'm just going to click up here
to render the object with ray tracing and you can see now we've got a much more shiny object
let's go across to lighting and we can change the lighting here so i can change it to my preferred
position i prefer mine to come in from the top left but you can select whatever you like you can
change the color of your light if you want to you can make it more or less intense i'm going to make
it a little bit less intense here you can rotate the light around by just dragging on the rotation
option and you can change its height so it's higher or lower on your shape you can also adjust
its softness and i am going to adjust its softness to make it a softer and more pleasing light but i
might change its height a little bit so it's still a bit shiny we can just tweak those settings and
then we have the shadows option and again that can be opened or closed using its disclosure triangle
i'm going to turn my shadows on and then we get two settings for shadows we can have it
behind the object or below the object i'm going to settle for below the object and because i've got
front i'm not actually seeing it so let's just go to the object and let's choose something
like off-axis front and that will give us a better idea when we're working with shadows so
i've got my shadow below the object but let's see what it would look like behind the object
i can also set the distance from the object
and wait until it renders now you'll see that the rendering is coming over the edge of the
image and that is a really big problem with this shadow effect you have to have
the shadow bound set high enough so that you can actually see your shadow and you may find
depending on the size of your object that your shadow just gets cut off again this is a far
from perfect tool this new 3d tool not sure i like it in particular but it does give you some
nice shiny objects if that's what you want and if you're prepared to deal with the fact that they
expand out to regular images so if i bring the shadow bounds in here you'll see that the shadow
just gets cut off so if your shadow is getting cut off you're going to need to increase your shadow
bounds so there is my new shiny object it looks really good but as i said
it is going to render very differently let me just select that and turn my
3d materials on and off so i can see what we've got from applying that 3d effect to the shape
now let's have a look and see what happens when we expand it going into my layers panel here you can
see that i have my shape here which is my half circle with the 3d effect applied to it nothing
too special there with it selected if i go to object and then expand appearance
things start to behave very very differently i'm going to open up my little panel in here and you
can see that this is an image it is just a raster image it's like a photograph or something that
you've imported as a jpeg file so just be aware that the new 3d tools in adobe illustrator as
cute as they might make some of these shapes don't have anywhere near the same effect when you expand
your object as you did with the older 3d tools and if you're watching videos online you can still get
access of course to those old 3d tools and in a lot of cases you're going to want to because the
effects that you can create are just so much more sophisticated before we finish up here i have more
illustrator training at skillshare.com including lots of 3d classes when you sign up for skillshare
you get access to thousands of classes there including over 270 of mine in the description
below you'll find a skillshare coupon which is at least as good as the current skillshare offer
and typically mine will be better i also have illustrator training at udemy.com and you'll
find a referral link to every one of those classes in the description below please feel free to share
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until next time my name is helen bradley thank you so much for joining me here on my youtube channel