From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

703 Another random distortion: Roughen

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

703 Another random distortion: Roughen

- In this movie, we'll take a look at another entirely random and absolutely dynamic distortion effect known as roughen. And I'm going to use roughen to add a sort of vegetal look to my art work and so notice here at the top, this green thing is actually a large lowercase E and then in the background we have a purple ellipse that I'm calling the eggplant. Alright so I'll go ahead and switch to the art work from the previous movie and also switch to the layers panel. And I'll twirl open the blends layer. And scroll to the very bottom and turn on this bottom most blend which is the E. Starting small and yellow and becoming big and green at the top of the document. And then I'll press the A key in order to switch to the white arrow tool and I'll go ahead and click right about there in order to select that giant letter E. Alright now I want it to be higher so I'm going to press control K or command K io a Mac to confirm that my keyboard increment is set to one point which it is so I'll just go ahead and cancel out. And then I'll press shift up arrow one two three four times to move the E upward 40 points. And I'll press shift left arrow to move it to the left 10 points. Alright now I want to apply that effect. By going up to the Effect menu, choosing Distort & Transform and choosing this guy right here, Roughen which is a kind of combination of the Tweak and the Zigzag Effects we saw in the previous movie. So I'm going to set this to Absolute for starters just so we can see what's going on and I'll turn on the Preview checkbox. Now where Tweak actually virtually moves anchor points and control handles, and Zigzag creates a kind of regular back and forth within a confines of a segment. Roughen is doing a back and forth as well but there's two big differences. One, it's random within this size value here, assuming that you've selected Absolute. And secondly, it doesn't have anything to do with segments and anchor points. Instead, you have so much detail per inch. So I'm allowing 10 random ridges to form in every inch. Alright but I want a lot of movement. So I'm going to take that size value up to 20 points so that we have some very spikey ridges indeed. And then I'll take the Detail value up to 20 ridges per inch and that's going to create some crazy spiking. Now I don't want all of my new virtual points to be corner points. I want them to be smooth points instead. So, I'll go ahead and switch to Smooth and that gives us some slightly rounded contours at which point I'll click Okay in order to accept that change. And just as with all the other effects, the blend takes that distortion into account so that we have a very smooth E upfront and then we have progressively rougher steps in between. Alright now I want to create that so called eggplant in the background. So I'm going to collapse the blends layer and I'll select the back layer and then I'll alter option click on a little page icon at the bottom of the layers panel to force the display of the layer options dialog box and I'll just go ahead and call this guy eggplant. And I'll change the color to let's say gold. And I'll click okay. Alright now I'm going to turn off the blends layer just so I can focus on this new layer here. And I'll go ahead and select the Ellipse Tool from the Shape Tool flyout menu. And I'll go ahead and click any old place inside my document window to bring up the Ellipse dialog box. And here's the values I came up with. The width of 920 points and a height of 540 points. I want you to know in real life, when I was creating this project, I just drew a big ellipse and then I modified its size to taste but this is what I ultimately came up with for purposes of you being able to follow along with me. Alright now click okay to create this great big thing here. And I'll go up to the control panel and I'll click on the word Transform. You might not need to if you have a wider screen. You may see some more values but I'm going to go ahead and click on Transform so I can see the X and Y coordinates. And I'm going to change the X coordinate to 520 points is the unit of measure and then I'll change the Y value to 320. And notice, this is very important by the way, that the center point is selected inside this tiny reference point matrix. So these X and Y values refer to the coordinate position of this point in the center of the ellipse. Alright I'll go ahead and press the enter key or the return key on the Mac to accept that change. And now I want to change my Fill and Stroke attributes. Actually the Stroke is just fine, it's a one point black stroke which is what I'm using. But I want the fill to be this shade of purple right here. The one that begins R equals 102. So I'll go ahead and apply that color. And now, I'm going to create a smaller version of this ellipse by switching to the Scale Tool which you can get by pressing the S key and then I'll just press the enter key or the return key on the Mac to bring up the scale dialog box. I'll set the uniform value to 68% and because the Preview checkbox is turned on, you can see that happen on screen. At which point I'll click the copy button to create a copy of the ellipse. I'm going to move it up 20 pixels by pressing shift up arrow a couple of times in a row, and then I'll change the fill for this guy to the shade of green that begins R equals 140. And we end up with two very uninspiring ellipses. Alright, let's make it a little more interesting by pressing the V key to switch back to the black arrow tool and then I'll shift click on the purple ellipse so that they're both selected. I want them to be at an angle so I'll select the Rotate Tool which you can get by pressing the R key and I'll press the enter key or the return key on the Mac to bring up the Rotate dialog box. I am indeed looking for an angle value of negative eight degrees and so having entered that, I'll click okay and now we're going to roughen up the shapes a little bit by first pressing the V key once again to switch back to the black arrow tool and I'll go ahead and click off the shapes to deselect them and I'll click on the larger shape, the purple one to select it and then I'll go up to the Effect menu and choose Apply Roughen, the very first command which is going to repeat my last settings. And I could do that actually for this inner ellipse as well even though I'm actually looking for a different effect. But I could just apply it like so. And then if I wanted to change my mind, I could go to the Window menu and choose the Appearance command to bring up the Appearance panel and then just click on the word Roughen and change my settings to taste. I'm going to turn on Preview checkbox so I can see what I'm doing and I'm going to click on the size value and press shift down arrow to take it down to 10 points. And I also want fewer ridges so I'm going to take the Detail value down to 10 per inch in order to produce this effect here. This is a random effect by the way, so your results will vary. Alright now, click okay to apply that change. And then shift click on the big purple spikey thing. And I'll go up to the object menu, choose blend and choose make in order to blend between these two shapes. So it doesn't matter whether you create the blend first as we've done in the past and then apply your distortions or if you apply the distortions first, and then blend the shapes like so. Either way, it is going to work. Alright now, I want to confirm how many steps I have so I'm going to go to the object menu. Choose blend and choose blend options. And I want the spacing step to Specified Steps and I am looking for 12 steps. So this is absolutely what I'm looking for. At which point, I'll click okay in order apply that change. And now, I'll switch back to my layers panel, click off the shapes to deselect them and I'll turn on my blends layer so that I can see those other letters that have blended so far. Now in the end I'm looking for this effect here. But I do want to show you something. Notice what's going on with the eggplant and the giant green E. In my newest version, it looks like this. In my previous version, it looks like this. So in other words, the ridges are changing on the fly and that's because, this is indeed an absolutely random effect. So bear that in mind, any time you're working with Tweak as in the previous movie, or Roughen as in this one, you are going to get a different effect every time. And just so you're prepared, we're going to go from this effect to this one next week.

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