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

927 Let's review that star technique

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

927 Let's review that star technique

- [Instructor] All right, in this movie, just to make sure I'm hitting things home, I'm going to show you how to extrapolate the technique that I showed you in the previous movie. However, instead of creating a perfect five-pointed star that measures exactly 400 points wide, I'll show you how to create a perfect six-pointed star that measures 500 points wide. And so just by way of demonstration here, I have these vertical guidelines set up exactly 500 points apart from each other. I also have a couple of circle guides, one of which has a diameter of 250 points; therefore half that for a radius of 125 points. Whereas the big circle, as you can see, measures 500 points around and so it has a radius of half that, or 250 points. All right, I'll go ahead and grab my star tool from the shape tool flyout menu, and then I'll just go ahead and click in the center right there, and I'll set the number of points to six, just so we have that set up and I'll change the Radius 1 value to 250, then I'll tab to Radius 2 and set it to 125 points and then I'll click okay. And while those points are clearly aligned to the two circular guides, they do not result in a star that has even sides. We should be able to see those sides moving straight across. Nor does the shape measure anything like 450 points wide. It's shy on both the left and right-hand sides. Now I do want a bigger line weight, so I'm going to crank this guy up in the control panel to four points just so we can see things better, and then I'm going to press the backspace key or the delete key on the Mac to get rid of that guy. All right, so what do we do? Start things up by selecting the line segment tool, which, by the way, you can get by pressing the backslash key, just in case you're curious. Then, click at the intersection of those two center guides and we want to very long line that's bigger than the outer radius, and so I'm going to go with the length 300 and then you want to set the angle value to 90 degrees and click okay. And that's intruding upon the text up here, but who cares? All right, now I'll go ahead and select the rotate tool, which you can get by pressing the R key, and then you want to alt or option click at the intersection of those two guides and this time, we're looking for an angle value of 360 degrees, which defines a circle divided by six sides and if you press the tab key, you'll see that gives us an angle of 60 degrees at which point, just click okay, 'cause we now have all the information we need. Go ahead and press control shift A, or command shift A on the Mac, to deselect that line. See how it extends beyond that vertical guideline? That's very important, by the way. And now what you want to do is switch back to that line tool, and then drag from the intersection of those two center guides to the point at which that line intersects the vertical guideline. And you can see we now have a distance value that is meaningful. So, to grab that value, you want to click with the tool to bring up this dialogue box specifically with that last linked value we just tracked and now you want to press control C or command C on the Mac in order to copy it. Then go ahead and cancel out. We don't need any more there. Now you can press the V key to switch to the black arrow tool. Go ahead and marquee both those path outlines and press the backspace key or the delete key on the Mac. All right, now switch back to the star tool. Click at the intersection of those two center guides to bring up the star dialogue box. This points value's fine; we want to change the first radius value to that value we just copied, so just go ahead and paste it in there and click okay and you can see we now have a shape that is actually 500 points wide. However, the opposing sides don't align with each other. If you want that, then you want to go ahead and grab your line segment tool once again, and drag from this guy all the way over so we have a nice horizontal line and you should see a D value of 500 points. So it should be exactly as long as you want the entire shape to be. Now you want to go ahead and switch to the rotate tool, which again, you can get by pressing the R key. Alt or option click at the intersection of those two center guides. Make sure the angle is still 60 degrees and this time, click the copy button in order to create a copy of that shape. There's the intersection we're looking for. Let's find out where it is using the line segment tool. So go ahead and grab that tool. Drag from the center, right there, the intersection of those two center guides, until you snap into alignment with the intersection of those new lines you just drew, and then click with the tool. Don't drag; it's really easy to do a tiny little drag and just absolutely mess things up and have to redo the steps. But in any event, this is fine. This is what you want. Go ahead and copy that value. Click cancel, 'cause we don't need anything else. Press the V key to switch back to the black arrow tool. Marquee those shapes like so; get rid of 'em. Then switch back to the star tool. Go ahead and click at the intersection of the two center guides, shift tab back to the Radius 2 value, paste that new value in the place, and click okay and you will have what we've been looking for: a shape that is exactly 500 points wide, it's upright, and all of the opposing sides exactly align with each other. So again, not the most exciting information, but extremely useful if you're interested in drawing multi-sided stars with exacting results here inside Illustrator.

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