if you want to learn some tips and techniques to create hyper realistic work in adobe illustrator
then today's video will be just for you i'm going to show you how to make this realistic 3d pill
but you can apply the content in today's video to other designs as well but first a quick 10 second
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later in today's video now i have here an artboard of 1920x1080 pixels but i'm going to zoom into my
workspace a tiny little bit for this 3d design it's going to be best not to work too large and
you will see why later but for now press l for the ellipse tool and hold down shift and click
and drag to generate a circle the color of your circle doesn't matter much at all to be honest
now press p for the pen tool hover your pencil on the left edge of the circle and click onto
the anchor points illustrator should snap right to it now then create a second point
somewhere up like this and then hold down shift to extend the path outward holding down shift
helps us keep the path aligned to the previous point horizontally as you can see here wherever
my cursor goes the line remains straight so make a third point in a similar position as a previous
and then click to the far right edge of the circle on the anchor point
finally close the path back at the right start you can press v to click away from your path
now choose a different color for this shape so you can easily see it on top of the circle with the
new shape selected press command or control c to copy it and then paste a duplication by pressing
command or ctrl f now click the top shape and hold down shift and rotate it a full 180 degrees
or you can just reflect it as well now move it into position like so
we've now made the shape for our design importantly we need to select everything and
then either press ctrl or command g or come up to here where you can group the objects in this drop
down menu now if we don't group the objects then the next steps simply just won't work so let's
go ahead and apply some 3d magic by opening the 3d materials panel found right here you're going
to need the most recent version of illustrator for this by the way and that is as of april 2022
so for this design we need to first use inflate so select that option and then for the plane
let's go ahead and use isometric top there are many settings that you need to be aware
of for this process and i'm going to show you my personal settings at the very end of the video
so as you can see at the moment we have too much inflation and we can change that with the volume
slider and you can see the changes in real time the depth slider well controls the depth of our
three-dimensional design and for this pill kind of design i want something like this
and again i will show you the finished settings later you can also change the orientation here
but i don't really mess with it because i find the controls too fiddly and command or control
z or z will snap back to the previous design okay so next we have the materials tab this will apply
textures to your design and this is very important to get right so your design does look realistic
for a medical pill i found that cardboard paper and also handmade rice paper seem to work best
you'll probably find that a lot of this design process will be trial and error but just to give
a brief rundown of the material settings here is the resolution of your output the better the res
the better quality of your design but the slower your computer will run and i'm going to change
this later and we will look into this later too a lot of these settings change the amount of
texture fibers and roughness for your materials as well as the counter fibers and so on at the
moment i'm using handmade rice paper but for the final output i do end up using the cardboard paper
now you can also change the color of parts of the materials as well and the pill is far from
finished but before we move on i want a background so that the lighting effects can be applied
best so press m for the rectangle tool and then create a rectangle i also want to send
this shape to the back of all layers and once you've done that it's time to apply a gradient
now to make that gradient just click right here and then select the freeform gradient
this will help provide a smooth and neat looking gradient for our backgrounds now you can move
your nodes around like so and also change their color by double clicking them and then choosing
the color of your choice and again i will show my final settings later in the tutorial
now you can experiment with what you think might look best for your design and once you do have
that background lock it down with command or control 2. now we're going to open this 3d tools
panel once more but this time we're going to look at the lighting now lighting is vastly important
to 3d work because it basically adds the realism that we're looking for we have four options at the
very top as kind of base starting points and i personally do quite like the diffuse option
the intensity controls how intense the lighting effects are the rotation controls where the source
of light is coming from around a 360 degree angle and the height controls how high or how low the
source of light is in relation to your design and of course the softness changes how soft or
stuck your light is to activate shadows we need to flick this switch right here
a lot of these effects will look pretty lame until we flick on the ray tracing option
and also we change a few other settings that i will show you soon but you want to work on
your design mainly with the more lame settings because your computer will not slow down that much
but as soon as you change to higher quality settings things do become slower and more laggy
for my final lighting settings i have the intensity sort of in the middle rotation
is 166 a fairly low height and a fairly high softness shadow bounds are right
up so we can see all of the shadows if your design is large it might be too big to show the
whole shadows and it might be cut off and this is why i said at the start of the tutorial that you
shouldn't make your design too big don't worry we can scale it up later but we're not done yet
there is one setting that totally changes the game as well as possibly blowing up your computer
so in the document raster effect settings panel we can change things to 300 ppi
this will give you an awesome render but it will totally slow everything down completely
of course it depends on how powerful your computer is but you should work in 72 ppi
and then export in 300 ppi i actually sped this part up but as you can see look how crisp and how
awesome this design looks right now i also need to show you the final material settings but first
we can duplicate this pill by holding down the alt option key and then clicking and dragging upwards
and then if we disable the shadows on the new design we can build a stack of objects
if you spend time working on the lighting and the shadows of multiple different 3d objects
you can end up with some really interesting and cool realistic designs so for my gradients here i
have five different notes two darker ones at the bottom and then three lighter nodes at the top
this suggests light and as you can see the shadow of my design extends into the darker
areas of my gradient now for the materials i did use cardboard paper with the highest
resolution i used a repeat of 100 a really low roughness of 0.14 and a fairly low fiber setting
now i think the other settings here are pretty standard but you should experiment with yours
and find the right texture for whatever it is you're designing now i also did change
the color of the material from a really brown to this kind of off-white and again here are
the lighting settings that i currently have on my design remember to work in a low quality
option and then change it to a high quality once you're ready to view it or export your design
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linked down in the description box below if you want to see more 3d tutorials in adobe illustrator
just click a video on screen and until next time guys design your future today peace