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

826 Creating a perfectly tessellating pattern

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

826 Creating a perfectly tessellating pattern

- [Instructor] All right, now we're going to take our happy houses complete with windows and we're going to convert them to a perfectly-tessellating tile pattern. All right, so the first thing I'm going to do is click on the stroke tab in order to collapse the gradient panel so I have a little more room to work. And then I'll turn on the guides layer down here at the bottom of the stack to remind you that a couple of weeks ago, we drew a hexagon that measured 450 points wide by 519.62 points tall. That first value is pretty easy to remember. That second value is not, so what I recommend you do is go ahead and double click in it in order to automatically switch to the type tool and then drag over that number to select it and then press Control + C or Command + C on the Mac in order to copy it. All right, now you can press the escape key in order to exit the text entry mode and switch back to the black arrow tool. At which point, I'll go ahead and click off the text to deselect it. All right, now I'm going to turn that guides layer off and I'll select all the objects on the scrinners layer, which is the only layer that's visible by pressing Control + A or Command + A on the Mac. Now I'll go up to the object menu, drop down to pattern and choose make in order to switch to the pattern editing mode and I'll go ahead and click on the word name and I'll change this guy to happy houses, like so, and then I'll switch the tile type to hex by row because that's the hex that has a pointy top and a pointy bottom, just like our houses right here. All right, now Illustrator's automatic estimation of how big this hexagon needs to be is pretty darn far off. And notice, it doesn't get any better if you turn on size tile to art, and I think this is one of the reasons why people get frustrated when working in the pattern editing mode is because they have no idea how big their pattern should be. You do, however, because a couple of weeks ago, we went ahead and measured that hexagon, so I'll go ahead and select the width value. You want size tile to art to be off, by the way, so I'll select that width value and change it to 450 points, and then I'll tab to the height value and press Control + V or Command + V on the Mac in order to set it to 519.62 points. And notice these overlap options, they allow you to decide which tiles are in front and which tiles are in back. They are unnecessary thanks to the fact that we have built our objects in advance for perfect tessellation. One more thing I want you to notice, I'm going to zoom in on this blue guy's face and I'm going to click right here with a black arrow tool. Notice that this blend has been converted to a group, as we can see over here on the far left side of the control panel. The same is true for this blend up here, as well as this guy, the one that's associated with the windows. And that's because blends are not compatible with the pattern-editing mode. Now I have to admit, I'm not sure why that is. Blends were introduced in Illustrator 88. The pattern-editing mode was introduced in CS6, which came along more than two decades later, so it seems to me blends should be supported, but in any event, they aren't. However, the good news is that their appearance remains unchanged. All right, so I'll go ahead and accept my changes by clicking on the done button and that will take me back out to Illustrator, as we're seeing here, and then I'll turn on my pattern layer, which currently features the isometric arrows that have so many gaps inside of them. That's why we're seeing through to the hair in the background. I'll go ahead and click on one of the colorful shapes to select that big rectangle and then with the fill active here inside the swatches panel, I'll go ahead and select happy houses, and we end up with this effect right here. Now you'll see that it's a little off center compared with the original objects in the background there. If that bothers you, if you want to exactly center the pattern, then click on that rectangle, the big rectangle that fills the entire art board in order to select it, and then with the black arrow tool active, press the enter key or the return key on the Mac to bring up the move dialog box and change the horizontal value to negative one and the vertical value to negative one, as well, and turn off this checkbox, transform objects, so that you're only transforming the patterns, which makes a pretty subtle difference, in our case, but we might as well do things right. At which point, I'll click okay in order to accept that change and we now have perfect registration, as you can see here. And that's how you take your carefully-assembled path outlines and turn them into a perfectly-tessellating tile pattern here inside Illustrator.

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