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

903 Rotate versus Transform Each in Illustrator

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

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903 Rotate versus Transform Each in Illustrator

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- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Now, as you may recall, we're in the process of creating the perfect pool hall clock inside Adobe Illustrator. Now so far, we have a green six ball, which will serve as the basis for the other solid balls, one through eight. And we have a purple 12 ball, which will serve as the basis for the other striped balls, nine through 11. This means rotating and duplicating the balls using the Rotate Tool, but also rotating each ball independently of its neighbors, using a special command called Transform Each. Now the Rotate Tool has been with us since Illustrator 1.0. I can't remember when Transform Each first appeared, but it's very old as well. And yet, the two have no more lost their freshly polished sheen than this pool hall clock. Here, let me show you exactly how they work. All right, here's the final version of the vector-based pool hall clock, just so you have a chance to see it open inside of the context of Adobe illustrator, we're going to be starting with these three balls right here. And so if you're working along with me, make sure that the Black Arrow Tool, the so-called Selection Tool is active. And you can get to it if you like by pressing the V key, and then click on the 12 ball in order to select its entire group, and Shift-click on the six ball so that both of those guys are selected. We're not going to be working with the cue ball for now. Then, you want to go over to the Layers panel and turn on the Guides layer at the bottom of the stack. And I'm not going to need this gradient panel, it's taking up a lot of room, so I'm going to just switch over to the much more shallow Stroke panel. And then, you want to go up to the View menu and make sure your Smart Guides are active, in my case, they are. So, I'll just go ahead and escape out of that menu. And then, you want to select the Rotate Tool, which just found inside of a fly-out menu, that includes the Reflect Tool. You get to the Rotate Tool incidentally by pressing the R key. All right, now notice that my transformation origin, that is the center of the rotation, is located by default right there at the center of the document. And so, all I need to do to apply a numerical rotation is press the Enter key. That's going to be the Return key on the Mac. Incidentally, I'll go ahead and drag this guy over here. And what you want to do is take 360 degrees, which is a full circle, and divide it by 12, because after all, there are 12 hours on a clock, and that's going to give you an angle value of 30 degrees, which is exactly what we want. At which point, you don't want to click okay, 'cause that's going to rotate the originals. You want to click Copy instead, which has a keyboard shortcut of Alt + Enter here on the PC, or Option + Return on the Mac. And we end up with this effect, which is good in so far as it goes. All right, now we just need to duplicate that rotation, and you can do that by going up to the Object menu, choosing Transform, followed by Transform again, which has a keyboard shortcut of Control + D or Command + D on the Mac. The D stands for Duplicate, which is what it does. It goes ahead and duplicates that rotation. Now, just in case you're curious, notice how this origin point right here, this little cyan target, you can barely see it on screen. But notice that it's drifting up and to the left. And that's because the center between these two selected objects is drifting as well. However, that is not representative of the actual rotation. The rotation is still being applied with the exact center of the document. How do I know that? Just because I've tested it out several times. All right, now what you want to do is press Control + D or Command + D on a Mac again in order to once again duplicate the selected balls. All right, now, at this point, we no longer need stripes. So notice in the final version of the clock that the stripes occur at nine, 10, 11, and 12, the solids go all the way from one to the notorious eight ball. So what we need to do now is just duplicate the solid ball, and I'll do that by pressing and holding the Control key or the Command key on the Mac in order to temporarily gain access to that last used arrow tool, which is the black arrow. Then I'll click off the shapes to deselect them. And with that Control or Command key still down, I'll click on the six in order to select it independently, and I'll go ahead and release the Control or Command key to return control to the Rotate Tool. And now I'll just press Control + D or Command + D on the Mac twice in a row in order to once again duplicate that six ball. All right, now we still need placeholders for what will be the seven and eight balls. And so I'll once again press and hold the Control key or the Command key on the Mac, click on the six ball to select it, and then release the Control or Command key to return control to the Rotate Tool, and now you want to move your cursor to the intersection of those two center guides right there, and Alt or Option + click in order to force the display of the Rotate dialog box. We still want 30 degrees, we just want negative 30 like so. And if your Preview checkbox is on, you can actually see what's going to happen. At which point, click on the Copy button in order to transform a copy of that object, and then press Control + D or Command + D on the Mac in order to once again duplicate it into place. Now the problem at this point is that all of the balls are at these wacky angles. We want them to be perfectly upright, every single one of them, and we're going to achieve that effect using a command called Transform Each. So, I'll go ahead and switch back to the document that we're working on here, and also switch back to the Black Arrow Tool, which you get by pressing the V key, once again. I'll click on this guy and Shift + click on this one. So these were the very first balls that we rotated into place. They're both off the same 30 degrees, by the way. And so I need to rotate them. Now, if I were to rotate them with the Rotate Tool, then they would share a common transformation origin, presumably right there near the center of the document. I want to rotate each one of them with respect to its own center, and you do that by going up to the Object menu, choosing Transform, and then choosing this guy, Transform Each, which has a keyboard shortcut, very much like Transform again, but it's smash your fist D instead. So Control + Shift + Alt + D here on the PC, Command + Shift + Option D on the Mac. Don't know if you really need to memorize that one, however, because we'll only be using this command very briefly. So, I'll go ahead and choose it, and that brings up this big dialogue box right here. Now, notice that my Rotate value is set to 30 degrees. That just happens to be the last rotation I applied using this command. I actually want it to be negative 30 degrees like so, and if you turn on the Preview checkbox, then you can see that makes each one of the balls upright with respect to its own center, as defined by this little reference point matrix right here. So notice that the center point is selected. We don't want copy this time, we want OK. So go ahead and click on the OK button, and the reason this works out so well, the reason that Illustrator sees each one of these balls as its own thing, by the way, is because we grouped them together last week. So you may recall if you saw the followup movie that we started by grouping all the objects inside the six ball, and we used that group to create the 12 ball. If these objects weren't grouped together, independent groups, by the way, then everything would rotate with respect to its center. So the text, and the circles, and rectangle and all that stuff would all get discombobulated. So, I want to emphasize, this guy for example, is its own group, and so is this one. So I'm going to Shift + click on it. So click on one, Shift + click on the other. You could go back to that command if you wanted to once again, and choose it, and apply a different value because after all, these guys are 60 degrees off, but instead, what I'm going to do is just press Control + D or Command + D on the Mac. And that invokes that command right there, Transform again, which this time is repeating Transform Each. That's not enough, as you can see, so you got to press Control + D or Command + D a second time in order to make those objects upright. All right, I'll go ahead and click on this guy, Shift + click on this guy, and press Control + D or Command + D on the Mac one, two, three times in a row. And now I'll select this guy by itself. We don't want to Shift + click, 'cause notice that this guy's not the same angle as this one. So just select it, press Control + D one, two, three, four times, that would be Command + D on the Mac, and then select this guy and press Control or Command + D one, two, three, four, five times in a row. All right, now, these guys are rotated the opposite direction. So, I'll go ahead and click on this guy to select it, and then return to that command, Object, Transform, Transform Each, and this time I will change that angle value to Regular, that is plus 30 degrees like so. And then if I press the Tab key with the Preview checkbox turned on, you can see that makes that guy upright, at which point I'll click OK, and then you want to select this one and press Control + D or Command + D on the Mac a total of two times. So one, two. And just like that, it appears upright as well. At which point, I'll click off the shape to deselect it, and I'll turn off the Guides layer as well. And that, if nothing else, shows you the difference between rotating objects using the old school Rotate Tool versus the Transform Each command here inside Illustrator. Say, I've got a question. What do you call eight green six balls and four purple 12 balls? Weird looking and highly inaccurate, which is why, if you're a member of LinkedIn Learning, I have a followup movie in which I show you how to recolor our various billiard balls so they look like the real things. If you're looking forward to next week, there is no next week in honor of the 4th of July, but the week after, we'll turn our attention from the various pool balls to the pool cues. Deke's Techniques almost each and every week. Keep watching.

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