Hi, this is Anne from Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to show you
how to make a 3D gradient to text effect in Adobe Illustrator. Alright, let's get started.
Alright, we're here in Adobe Illustrator. So I'm just going to come over here to Create New,
I'm going to choose Web up here at the top. And then I'm going to choose 1280 by 1024, and Create.
And the reason I did this because I want this to have really vibrant bright colors,
and that's best in RGB color space. So first, I'm going to draw a circle, I'll hit L on my keyboard,
which will bring me to the Circle tool, and then I'll just draw a circle right here,
I'm going to open my Gradient palette, which is under Window.
And we'll just choose that. I'm just going to click on my gradient slider.
Now you might notice you have an outline on this circle. Click that and just get rid of it
because it'll make the blend look really weird. Okay, so let's get back on our fill. I'm going
to double click this side of the gradient slider. And you might notice you only have grays in here.
If you see that, just come up to the flyout and choose RGB. And I'm going to choose kind of a,
a greenish teal color. We'll double click the other end of the gradient and do the same thing.
And for this one, I think I'm going to choose kind of a
bluish purple. Now I want the light color to be on top and the darker color to be
on bottom instead of left to right. So I want to change my angle here to 90.
And you can see is the opposite of what I want, so I'm going to come over here and flip it.
Okay, and this is looking nice. Now I'll get my Selection tool, and I'm going to click and
drag while holding SHIFT and OPTION or ALT on a PC. And then we'll make a copy
along the same plane. Now we're almost ready to do our blend. Let's come over here to the Blend tool,
I'm going to click it and then I'm going to hit Enter or Return to bring up the blend options.
Now I've got this set at 1000 steps. And that's what I want, you want it as high as it'll go.
The max number of steps you can have is 1000. So that's perfect. And for the orientation,
we'll want to Align to Page because it just makes it look really nice. Okay, so we'll say OK. Now
I'm still on the Blend tool, I'm going to click on this first one, and then click the second one.
And that'll make a cool gradient blend between the two circles, and we can zoom in really close.
And when we zoom in really close, it's a very smooth blend because of the 1000 steps. Okay,
now we can hit N to get to our Pencil tool, and then I'm going to draw some text. And I want to
make sure that the settings on this are right, so I'm going to hit Enter or Return. And that'll
bring up the options. I want the fidelity to be really smooth, so I've got it all the way over
here. And we'll say OK. Now I'll start drawing the word 'hello.' I don't have a very steady hand,
so this might be a little bit ugly. But the pencil tool did a pretty good job of fixing it because
it's a lot smoother than what you saw a second ago. I'm going to select this one up here and just
smooth this out. I'll select both of those points with my A tool (Direct Selection) and move them
back up. Then we can hit N and OPTION or ALT to just smooth out these pieces a little bit.
Okay, so this is looking sort of okay. I'm going to select that and then hold SHIFT and select a
blend, then we'll come up to Object > Blend and Replace Spine. Okay, now you can see that it's
taken those two circles and applied it to the text. And one thing I think we should change
is the size of our circles because they seem really too big for the text. So what we can do is
hit CMD Y or CTRL Y on a PC. And you can see that Illustrator has moved the circles to the beginning
and the end of the text. I'm going to use my Group Selection tool, which is right under here.
Select that first circle, hold SHIFT and select the second circle. And then we'll
do SHIFT OPTION CMD D, that SHIFT ALT CTRL D on a PC. I want to put them both at 80% scale
and we'll Preview and say OK. And then we'll hit CMD Y or CTRL Y to get back out. Let's do that
again - it's still not quite small enough. I'll hit SHIFT OPTION CMD D and then do another 80%.
We can toggle the preview on and off to see what we're going to get.
Okay, well that's pretty good. We might want to smooth this out a little more
and maybe pull this part out so we can see inside the E. The problem is my handwriting is not that
great. So you can also do this with a font as a template. And that seems to work a lot better,
at least it does in my case. So let's hit T on our keyboard, and I'll click once, I'm just going to
type the word text, I'll get back on my Selection tool, I'll hold SHIFT and make it a lot bigger.
And then I'm going to change this to Sacramento. Okay, this looks pretty cool, I'm going to still
make it a little bit bigger. And I kind of want a slant on this. So I'm going to hit E
on my keyboard to get to the Free Transform tool ... just get on the top until I get this cursor,
and then pull it and hold SHIFT. Okay, I'm liking that. Okay, now I'm going to lock this with CMD 2,
or CTRL 2 on a PC. And then I'm just going to trace it with the Pen tool, I'll hit P to get
my Pen tool. I've zoomed in a little bit, and I'm just going to click on a bright color, so I can
see what I'm doing. And I don't want a fill, so I'll get rid of that. I don't think I want these
loops in here, so I'm just going to pretend they don't exist. I'm also going to increase my stroke.
And of course, this is just a template. So you don't have to follow it exactly, it's just
helping you to get a little more uniform text. And I'll speed this up so you don't have to just
wait while I do it all. Okay, so I changed some of it a little bit like the crosses on the T's,
just to make them a little more interesting. I'm going to CMD minus. And now we need to know how
many paths we have. So I've got one. I'm going to hold SHIFT and just select them. There's two,
I've got that one and that one. So I've got four total. And that means I need to have four copies
of the circles. So with my group Selection tool, I'm just going to grab the circle,
at the end of this 'hello.' I'll hold SHIFT and grab the other circle. And now I'm going to copy,
deselect and paste those. Deselect is SHIFT CMD A or SHIFT CTRL A on a PC. I'm going to align those,
you're probably don't have to do that at all. But now we'll want to do the blend. So to do that,
it's OPTION CMD B, or ALT CTRL B on a PC. And we'll need four copies of this one for each path.
So I'm just going to hold SHIFT and OPTION or SHIFT and ALT to drag a copy. And then
I'll hit CMD D or CTRL D a couple times to get my other two copies.
Now I'm going to select the first path and the first blend. And we'll come up here to
Object > Blend > Replace Spine. We'll do the same with the next part,
and then go ahead and do the same with the other two.
Now I'm going to unlock that background image. So I'll just come up here to Object,
Unlock all. And now we can just delete it. So we're left with just the text now. So
now I'm going to make a few changes. I'm just going to smooth this out down here.
I'm going to get into CMD Y mode - that's Preview Mode - so that I can make changes without having
to see the blends. CMD Y or CTRL Y to get out of that. I think I want the crosses to be in front
and I'll move that down so it looks a little more natural. And then I'm just going to hit CMD Y.
And I think I want it to start over here. So I'm going to hit P, grab that piece and then just pull
down like this. And you'll notice when I do that, it puts the circle on the new end.
So that's kind of interesting. I'll just pull that down a little more. And that's how to get a cool
3D tube text effect in Illustrator. Alright, if you liked this video and you want to see more
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every time a new video comes out. Alright, I'll see you in the next video. Thank you!!!