hi guys welcome back to our channel the number one place for people who love design art and
all things creative you are watching Dantier + Balogh's channel my name is Laszlo and today i'm
going to show you how you can do a little bit of 3d interior design work using nothing but adobe
illustrator which sounds a bit crazy i know but we'll talk about that later what you need to know
for now is the latest version of adobe illustrator 2022 added a few very interesting 3d effects onto
its toolkit which i thought with a little bit of creativity we can utilize to set up a very simple
three-dimensional interior space even if you have never done any 3d work before as long as you have
a basic basic understanding of how illustrator works you can do this ok come I'll show you how..
instead of the beginning let's start at the very end this is what we are going to put together
a little living room interior setup which looks quite complex when you look at it
as a whole but once you break the scene down to its own individual
objects it's actually not much more than a bunch of simple rectangles and circles
okay so let's open up illustrator and start designing this big sofa as i said we are going
to make most of these with basic rectangles so i'm just gonna drag one out with this rectangle tool
we don't need the stroke we just want a solid color fill for now
i'm just setting mine to a simple gray color and then once you went up the window and opened up
the 3d and materials box you can just click on the extrude effect this basically elongates our
shape onto this imaginary 3d sphere in terms of view i'm just gonna set this and most of my
other following shapes to the off axis front view to have this basic isometric composition
all i do here is i toggle this side scroll to modify my extrusion levels until i get something
that resembles the side bits of a sofa besides this since all this 3d is just an effect on
top of a basic shape we can always select all rectangle points with the selection tool and
modify them elongate the sides grabbing the corner points and whatnot and the applied 3d effect will
change on your shape in real time which is quite impressive i gotta give that to adobe
now all of these edges on our shape are quite harsh so i want to smoothen things out a little
bit for a nicer softer furnishing effect right for that i do two things first of all i just manually
add curved edges to my rectangle by dragging all corners simultaneously with my selection tool
and then i go back to my 3d settings and activate the bevel function i switch this
to a round bevel and make sure that it doesn't repeat i just want one smoothened edge effect here
now once this is done i am going to create another rectangle but this time i drag out
a shorter and wider one because this is going to be the base for our sofa cushion
i extrude this one as well in the 3d window
then i add my bevels making sure it has the exact same settings as the side piece did
now i'm basically just eyeballing the level of
extrusion and the placement of this cushion in relation to my side piece
naturally this object has to be behind the previous one so i do
a right click and i send it to the back in the arrangement settings
once it's lined up nicely i'm just going to duplicate my cushion put that in place then
duplicate again and this third one i'm going to extrude a little bit more because i want
to design one of those big L-shaped sofas to make this a little bit more interesting once it's done
i just toggle things with my arrow keys really to put all of this in place then of course i'm
gonna duplicate the side piece too put this to the back and add it to the edge of my big piece
on the right here and align it with everything after that i need to add the back pieces as well
for that of course another rectangle is needed this time a nice and big one that is not thinned
out on either side now we extrude this of course and manually adjust it until it fits the rest
of our composition here of course we need to put this onto the back give it the same bevel settings
that we added to everything before and duplicate it two times and once they are put into place we
get the basic skeleton of our sofa now once that is done i thought for that extra level of visual
interest i'm going to create base pieces to put under my cushions as well by making two
very long and thin rectangles with the exact same settings as all these other bits of course
the left bit under the smaller cushions need to be a bit wider and the right one smaller but more
extruded in order to make our composition well maybe not hyper realistic but at least believable
after that all that's left to do is adding some actual legs to the sofa
for that i'm going to create another small long rectangle but instead of extruding it onto a 3d
space i'm going to use this other 3d function called revolve which as the name suggests turns
your object onto a cylinder shape by revolving it 360 degrees around itself we can change the
color of this if we want to and like always i manually adjust the sides to make it a bit thinner
then i put this and a couple duplicates of this onto the corners and that's that
this is our basic sofa composition done
now so far so good i hope we haven't done anything too advanced just yet so i hope
you're all still following along up until this point all of this could have been done
in previous versions of adobe illustrator as well if needed be but things get a little bit
more interesting once we switch our 3D window to this materials section as well as trying
out the revolve the inflate the rendering and all these other new 3d illustrator functions
now that we have our basic sofa i'm going to switch to the materials panel
because well this is a thing now that illustrator can do we can select our 3D object and choose a
texture or material to add on top of it for the sofa i'm selecting this one called oxford fabric
give the program a second to take action and once the material is applied we get to mess
with it a little bit if you scroll down to its settings we can change the colors
of it for example or the scale and size of the effect until we see something we actually like
unfortunately the same effect cannot be applied to grouped objects so once i'm happy with my setup
i have to add this material to all my bits all my little sofa cushions one by one which of course is
super tedious work and we can only hope that this is something that with time adobe will improve on
now that is our main bit of furniture done so now we get to move on to designing some smaller items
to fill up our room with first of all i want to design some cushions to put on top of this sofa
for this i'm going to drag out a perfect square by holding down shift while using the rectangle tool
and then to make it 3d i'm going to use the inflate tool here instead of our trustworthy
extrusion or revolve tools to kind of puff up this shape a little bit i inflated the shape on
both sides which you can check once you start rotating the object and here with this volume
slider you get to determine how much of this inflating effect you want to have on your object
for our pillow we don't need this to be that extreme so i toned it down a bit now this
cushion looks a bit too angular a bit too perfect at the moment so i'm going to so i'm gonna go up
to the effects open up the pucker and bloat tool and give it an ever so slight puckering effect
see for me this is more of an organic cushion shape which i can work with
and now what i want to do is put this in place which is going to be
in this corner of the sofa and instead of using a view preset i'm just going to manually rotate
the object with either the angle sliders here or by hovering over the shape with
my mouse and rotate it around by hand until it looks like it's in the right perspective
naturally just like we did with the sofa we get to add a nice material on top here too
i went with the circular stitch material changed the color
then i just duplicate my finished cushion a couple of times and scattered them around this sofa
once that is done i thought we could add a nice little glass coffee table onto the front
for that what i'm going to do first is put some crossed legs down on which the table top will
rest you guessed it this is going to be built on thin and tall rectangles which we will extrude
to get the middle piece extrude it quite a bit as this is going to go through the whole table modify
its points by hand of course then what you do is copy this shape and elongate it onto the side by
holding down shift with two side points selected to create this wider rectangle then of course we
need to go back to the extrusion settings and make this really thin maybe around 10 15 pixels
until it feels like the same width as this other middle bit this one i'm going to put in front of
the previous panel then i duplicate it and i put the duplicates behind the original long panel and
line it up with the previous one until the whole thing looks like it's perfectly aligned across to
create this illusion that these two smaller bits are actually joining up material wise there are a
couple nice wooden looking ones in this library so feel free to experiment i'm going with this
one called natural chestnut wood apply this to all three of your pieces then the legs are done
as for the tabletop i thought instead of making everything so angular i'm going to use the ellipse
tool this time to create a nice circular table i'm drawing one out extrude it as we do quite
thinly then manually rotate and adjust it to the right angle i'm using a very neutral looking color
for this piece and also taking down the object's opacity which not only helps with putting this
perfectly on top of my legs but also creates that see-through glass-like effect i'm looking for
now we're really getting somewhere so i thought as the last step i would show you how to create
a couple more intricate objects for this living room and also once you are done with everything
how you can render your objects at this point i started getting quite confident around these
tools so i thought let's challenge ourselves and make something more complex like a book which is
actually very simple all we need to do is create two rectangles a big one which will be the cover
and a smaller off-white one which will be the pages we need to overlay this onto the left side
a little bit so the pages will show on the side we can also subtract a little ellipse from here
with the shape builder tool to create that nice little curve our pages would have now once we
group these two shapes we can extrude them to get that nice book shape it's pretty clever isn't it
this is the best use i have found for our extrusion tool so far after which i thought
let's make the most of the revolve tool as well just like we did for the legs of our sofa if you
draw out a rectangle but then you bring in some of these points to the side to create a bit of
a trapezoid shape the revolving function will help you to design curvier more organic looking objects
this way like glasses cups or vases it kind of works like the way a potter's wheel would work
for pottery and once you realize this you can push this function to the absolute limits like i
did and combine maybe a circle with rectangles to create a simple two-dimensional light bulb which
then you can revolve or do a half circle which after manually messing with could be a lampshade
i thought it would be pretty cool to have a nice big extending lamp on the side like this
so once i had these main elements i just made a big frame by using the pen tool
you literally just lay down four points like this blow up the stroke size a little bit then
you can extrude to get the right perspective for this bodywork for the frame i switched to a
lighter color to get more realistic shadings and also brought in these straight angles
with the direct selection tool to make the whole thing a bit curvier so it flows better yeah
see all it takes is a little bit of creativity then you can interior design
yourself to the point where things are actually starting to look like a nice and cozy room
now before you go and start exploring things for yourself the last thing you need to know how to do
is render your finished objects this can only be done to individual objects at a time
so here i'm ungrouping this little footstool for example then i go to the right side of
this 3d and materials window i drop this little square thing down then i turn on ray tracing
i put the settings to high then all you do is click render you give your computer a
moment or two to do the job and then you're done now repeat it to all of your objects
as i said this can't be applied to groups which is one of the many many limitations of
this quote on quote fake 3d functions within adobe illustrator you can't move complex objects around
in this 3d space if it's made of groups because all your objects will do is they will start
revolving around themselves individually there's a lot of illogical decisions surrounding this 3d
tool a lot of clumsiness which makes me ask the question what is the point who is this for really
i mean if you push yourself and work your way around these problems you can create nice enough
looking things like i did here but actual 3d designers like Jacqueline would think that these
functions are way too limiting illustrator is over complicating things and from certain aspects
it's downright laughable when you put it next to proper 3d applications like blender or cinema 4d
and people like me whose main focus is 2d design are we going to use this ah
maybe feel free to let me know if you have found a good way to build these functions
onto your proper design workflow and i'm not just being cynical here i am genuinely curious
what people will use this thing for okay now if you're a regular creative crew member you know
that this video was kind of that sweet spot in terms of our content because we talk a lot
about illustration graphic design architecture and interior design in this channel i hope you
guys enjoyed this feel free to leave a like to help us reach even more people on this
channel and i hope to see you next time with some other cool creative stuff yeah until then see ya