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Hey everybody, I'm Nathaniel Dodson from tutvid.com, welcome right into
this Adobe Illustrator tutorial. Where we're going to cover five tips and tricks
for the path finder panel, that you maybe have not known about before. The
path finder is such an incredibly useful tool when it comes to shape building
in Adobe Illustrator. And the more you know about how to work with path finder,
the more you're not going to feel like you're running into a situation where you
can't figure out how to make a shape in Illustrator. And making shapes is kind of
the name of the game when you're working with most types of illustration, maybe
not all. But a lot of them. If you enjoy this tutorial, make sure you go ahead and
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jump into Adobe Illustrator right now, and check this thing out.
Alright, here we are in Adobe Illustrator. I'm going to open up the path finder panel,
because that's what we're going to talk about here. You can find it under Window>
Path Finder. If you've never used it before, well, stick around, because you can do
an awful lot with a path finder. I've got some shapes here that I've been messing
around with, and playing with. Actually, all this stuff over here, I thought I was
going to incorporate into the video, but it's not really - but I thought it looked
kind of cool, so I'm just going to leave it there. Let's take a look at this little,
courthouse-looking shape first. I want to show you couple things here with this,
with regard to the path finder panel. So let's select this, and let's actually grab
these three rounded rectangle, extended pill shapes. And I'm going to go
Object>Arrange, I'm going to bring these to the front, so they're on top. We
can do something where we select all these shapes, and we say, hey look,
a path finder, minus front. And what this is going to do, is it's going to take those
front shapes, and it's going to just use them to punch a hole in the stuff behind
it. Now, you can see, we only really got one object left, and we're kind of stuck
with that object. So it's a little messy. With something like this, you might be
better off creating a compound shape. And you can do this, by ALT/OPT clicking
on that shape mode. And you can see, it looks different. But, it doesn't look as
different as we want, because we still want the top of the courthouse to be there.
Let's undo it one more time, and I'm going to select the top and bottom of the
courthouse shapes, and I'm going to group them. Object>Group, and now I'm
going to select everything. ALT/OPT click on the shape mode, and there we go.
Now we preserve the top and bottom of the courthouse, and we have the cutouts
that we want. But the cool thing about the compound shape, is you can double
click to get within it. And you can take the shapes that make up a compound shape,
and adjust them, and push them around wherever you want them to go. So we
could take the shape, essentially, that looks like that, and we could, you know what?
We could do this, or I could push this down, and it almost looks a little bit more
like an airplane. Maybe I could take the bottom shape, if I double click into here,
I'm sorry, not double click into here. Use the direct selection arrow. Select that.
I could shift this up a little bit. Maybe something like that. And we have more of,
I don't know, some sort of bizarre looking airplane shape. The point is, when
you're working in a compound shape, like this, you preserve all of your shapes.
And you're able to go in and continue editing the compound shape you've
created, if you decide you want to move these shapes around later. Maybe the
client says they want the pillars to be quite a bit narrower and closer together,
something like that. And you can easily come in, and just shift them around
like that. And that's all you need to do, you don't need to redraw the entire
shape, or go in and delete a bunch of anchor points, and join a bunch of
anchor points together, and mess around with stuff like that. So there is some
merit to ALT/OPT clicking on some of these modes over here in path finder,
and creating a compound shape. Instead of just willy-nilly going and punching
holes, and joining stuff together, just like you normally would. So, the next
shape I want to talk about, is this interesting-looking shape here where I have
a number of rounded rectangles that are overlaid over this rectangle that I've
cut all these shapes into. And I'm looking at this, and I decide, you know what?
I want all of these to be merged together, so I can select them all, and I can use
the merge function here in path finder. And then I decided, I'm looking at it, and
I want these shapes - I want to drag these straight down to like here. The problem
is, you can see, I've got these teal lines that are left behind. And they're left behind
because there are anchor points that are left behind there. You can see all these
anchor points along here that are left behind. Well, we can get rid of most, if not
all of these anchor points on a regular basis. I'm going to undo this to get me back
to just my normal shapes. There's an option here in the path finder panel, under
path finder options called remove redundant points. Redundant, extra,
unnecessary points. So now I can select all this stuff, I can choose merge, and you
can see, sure enough, virtually all of those extra points are gone. There are a couple
that are still there, and it's probably because the path is not 100% aligned and
precise as it should be, and that's something that I would need to go in and fix,
but everywhere where it's lined up perfectly, we don't have that over abundance
of extra anchor points. And at this point, we could grab these rounded points,
drag them all the way down, and we have no weird, funky lines that are being
left behind. Alright, for the third shape, and the third tip, I should say. I'm going
to drag over these two ellipses to select them, and what I'm going to do, is come
into my path finder drop down or flyout menu, and choose to make these two
shapes a compound shape, right off the bat. You can see what I've got here now,
is this donut shape. And if I double click into my compound shape, because I just
didn't use a shape and punch a hole randomly in the middle of it using minus
front, I can still select this circle, and adjust this and line it up exactly as I wish.
There's a lot that I can do here. Now, in this case, I probably just want to leave
it in the center and keep my little donut shape. And then hit the escape key to
get out of isolation mode. And I have this nice donut shape. But, again, very
important to note: it is very editable. You can go in there, and here I'm just
selecting with my direct selection tool, and you can go in there and move it
around, and change things up, just as you wish, very, very easily. Alright, let's
move down over here. And the fourth thing I want to show you, is if we take
something like this. This shape. It's just essentially a titled square, and it's going
to be cutting a piece out of the front of this donut shape to make the letter 'c.'
But, for whatever reason, I want to save some of the pieces of the shape,
so instead of going with a minus front, I'm going to go with the divide function
here. So, I'm going to go divide, and this is going to put all this stuff, as you can
see here in the layers panel, it's putting it all into this group. I can ungroup it,
CMD/CTRL+SHIFT+G , and I've got this shape here, I've got this shape on the
ring, whoop! I don't want to double click into it. I've got that shape of the ring,
I've got this little piece here, but I also have this just blank, empty path that's
unused in there. It's kind of annoying when you have this stuff. Because if I were
to select this, and say, you know what? Instead of this being the seafoam green,
I actually want to move it to more of a light blue. But, when I select everything,
obviously, this unfilled path gets selected and filled, as well. So, again, we have
the option in Illustrator, in the path finder panel, under path finder options to
divide an outline, we'll remove unpainted artwork. So, stuff that doesn't have
a filler stroke, get rid of that stuff! I'm going to say, yeah, go for it. Give it to me.
So, I'm going to these, now I'm going to divide, and I'm going to ungroup.
CMD/CTRL+SHIFT+G, and I'm going to select the shapes one at a time, there's
that shape. There's that shape. There's that shape. And there's nothing left in
the center. All we have, is our nice letter 'c' and if I select all this stuff, I can
easily change the color, and nothing else is affected. So the last thing I want
to show you, the fifth little tip and trick. The hidden tip and trick in path finder,
is the ability to quickly and easily repeat a path finder operation with a hotkey.
So this is really used for when you're working on very intricate illustrations, and
building very complex shapes. I find it particularly useful when I'm outlining
artwork, and I just have a lot of pieces that are going, and either need to be merged
together or divided apart, or whatever it may be. Being able to execute something
that's going on over in the path finder panel that you need to do a bunch of times
in a row with a hotkey, is nice, because instead of disengaging your mouse, and
moving from here all the way to wherever your path finder is and back, you can
just bam! bam! bam! bam! bam! use a hotkey! So, what we can do, is we could
select two of these rings here, right? See these rings? And, maybe I just want to
merge them together, so I'm going to choose the little merge option here, and now
they're merged together. Now, I didn't realize at the time when I selected these,
that maybe I wanted to merge the next one. So, what I can do, is I can use the flyout
menu, and there is the repeat merge option. And I don't know why, it makes it
even more difficult to go into a flyout menu, to hit repeat merge. The only thing
I can think, is maybe they made it a menu option so a hotkey could be assigned to
it. And that's the hotkey I want to talk about, and it is CMD/CTRL and the number 4.
And then we can select by SHIFT clicking the next ring, CMD/CTRL+4. And then,
we see them, we're like, yeah, that's pretty cool. I actually want to move this up here
maybe, kind of like this. Something like that. We're going to nudge this until it looks
about like that. And then we're going to select all these shapes, and CMD/CTRL+4.
And we just go ahead, and merge all these shapes together into this one, very, very
much more complex shape than what we had. And then, if we look at our big
rings, and we say, you know what? We actually want all these merged together,
as well. CMD/CTRL+4, boom! They're all merged together, just like that. One giant
shape that easily. A little CMD/CTRL+4 to just repeat the previously used path
finder operation here in the panel. It, actually, is much more useful than it sounds
at first glance, especially if you're working with complex shapes, and complex
illustrations, where you just want to quickly be able to grab a couple shapes and
boom! Perform an action that you've been performing all day long.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is it for this one. If you enjoyed it, again, make
sure you subscribe to the YouTube channel, so you never miss any Illustrator
tutorials in the future. And you can give me a follow over there on Instagram,
if you do the Instagram thing. That'd be cool, as well. But, for now, for
repeating a path finder action, for removing redundant points, for deleting
unfilled artwork, and all the other stuff about path finders that we covered in this
casual jaunt through the path finder panel in Adobe Illustrator, ladies and
gentlemen. That is it!
Get it? Got it? Good!
Nathaniel Dodson, tutvid.com, I'll catch you in the next one!
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