(lively music)
- [Dan Kuhlken] I'm going to start off with a pattern
called an isometric pattern.
Technically it's a tessellation,
but it's kind of the gateway
into more complex tessellations.
And there's a quick and easy way
to turn that into an actual pattern using Illustrator.
So as you can see,
we created this pattern in this file here,
and it's using this cube repeating itself in a grid.
I kind of changed the colors here to
kind of show a light source.
So it has a bit of a three dimensional look,
which is kind of cool.
But what makes it technically a tessellation
is that there's no gaps, there's no overlapping.
Everything kind of pieces together like a puzzle piece.
And you want to create this shape first to get to this step.
So I'm going to show you how to do that real quick.
You're going to go into your shape area
and you're going to select "Polygon"
and you want to make sure that you have six sides,
which will turn into a hexagon.
Right now I have it colored as one color.
I'm going to go ahead and turn it onto its side.
And with the line segment tool
I'm going to start breaking it up into pieces.
So I'm just going to start connecting nodes
to their opposite side.
And as you can see, if I were to grab everything,
we have kind of everything split up
into these little triangle pie pieces.
And I'm going to go ahead and go to the pathfinder
and break that up using the divide.
And then I'm going to change the colors of certain facades.
So on this side,
I'm going to turn it to a slightly darker color
and then this one will be even darker,
so similar to what I created here.
And it's still in a bunch of pieces,
but you can clearly see that it's a cube now
by just turning one side into a lighter side
and one side to a darker side
and having that kind of three shades going on.
So once you have this isometric cube created,
let's go ahead and size it evenly
so that it is 100 pixels tall,
and I'll explain why in a second.
Once you have it selected and you have it sized,
you're going to go into "Object>Pattern>Make"
and you can see it grids itself out automatically.
And in order to kind of create this isometric pattern,
we want to shift each row again
using this brick by row technique.
And we want these rows to line up with this corner here.
Now you could just kind of play around with the height
and get pretty close,
but you can see there's not perfect math
on how to get that right.
The trick is that you want it to be 75% of its height.
So this is why I decided this is going to be 100
and the height is actually going to be 75.
That will allow this to be as tight as possible
with no gaps, no overlapping.
And the trick to know this is,
it's also the size of one facade.
Like the height of this facade is actually 75 pixels tall.
It's just the way this math works
with hexagons broken up like this.
It's just an important thing to remember,
that 75% of the height is also the gap
they're going to be reducing it down to,
so that it can actually line up like this.
So that's the basis of it.
You basically just need to press "Done" at that point
and like always, go ahead and create a new shape
to see what it looks like.
And voila.
So just like anything else,
you can change the scale of this, the rotation of it.
I did not change all this to global colors,
so in order to change this,
I would have to manually go in and change those colors.
But before you get started, remember,
always turn everything to global colors
in case you want to change the color of this pattern.
And if you ever want to change the pattern itself,
remember you can always go back in
and double click the swatch.
Once you have a swatch like this,
all you have to really do is select it.
You can update it's scale to show more cubes.
I'm just going to keep these cubes large
for the sake of seeing it on screen
and go ahead and expand it.
And you'll see that when you select inside,
all these shapes now are expanded.
And I also want to go into the pathfinder area
and select "Trim".
That'll make sure that you
can literally see all these shapes
and a quick and easy way
to turn this into an actual grid system
that you can illustrate on top of,
is just to press "Command+5".
And what that does is takes everything that was there
and it's no longer fills.
And now everything's been turned into a guideline
and this is a really quick and easy way
to just start illustrating, let's say an isometric city
by using these as guides.
And rather than using cubes,
I can make more shapes other than a cube.
I can make a little skyscraper.
But this is a great start to an isometric illustration
to use as a guideline system.
That's isometric patterns.
You can see that's very versatile.
It goes as far as making something
as for an aesthetic choice,
all the way to creating a grid system
for isometric illustration.
Technically that was a tessellation,
but we haven't even gotten into
the world of tessellations really.
That's just the tip of the iceberg.
(upbeat music)
Thanks for watching.
If you enjoyed this video,
feel free to like and subscribe
to stay up to date on all of our latest videos.
(upbeat music)