Real World Adobe® Illustrator® CS2 [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Distort & Transform: The Power of Change

Throughout your design process, you are constantly making changes to your artwork. Sometimes, you need to alter paths by distorting them and other times you need to transform them using functions like Scale or Rotate. Illustrator features a variety of these functions as Live Effects, which make it easy to go back and perform tweaks or changes to these settings as necessary.

Distortion Effects

Illustrator features six different distortion effects, each providing a different type of look and feel. Distortion effects in particular are useful when applied to strokes or fills individually, and this is especially so when you're building complex appearances that contain multiple fills and strokes. You can find each of the effects listed here by first choosing Effect > Distort & Transform and then by choosing one of the following distortion effects:

Free Distort. The Free Distort effect displays your art with a rectangular bounding box. You can drag any of the four corners to stretch or apply a distortion (Figure 7.69 ). This is useful if you want to add perspective to make art appear as if it has a vanishing point, although the 3D Rotate effect offers similar functionality in that regard.

Pucker & Bloat. The Pucker & Bloat effect offers a slider that applies distortion to your objects by spiking paths. When you're looking for a really funky shape, this distortion effect probably fits the bill.

Roughen. The Roughen effect allows you to take straight paths and make them appear as if they just experienced an earthquake (Figure 7.70 ). The Roughen dialog offers the ability to adjust size and detail; you can also specify whether you want the result to have smooth (rounded) or corner (straight) path segments.

Tweak. At first, the Tweak effect appears to be similar to the Pucker & Bloat distortion, but the Tweak effect adjusts control points in addition to anchor points on paths. The result is a path that is far less predictable.

Twist. The Twist effect allows you to twist art from its center using a specified angle.

Zig Zag. The Zig Zag effect is similar to the Roughen effect, but it creates methodical zigzag patterns on selected objects.

Illustrator also has other distortion tools and effects. The Warp effect, covered later in this chapter, provides a way to stretch art using predefined warp styles. Other distortion features like Envelopes and the Liquefy set of tools are covered in Chapter 9.

Transform Effect

If you want to rotate or scale an object on your artboard, using the Transform effect is overkill. Rather, the Transform effect is useful when you want to apply transformations to parts of an object. For example, you might scale two different fills within the same object so they are different sizes. To do so, apply the Transform effect, choose Effect > Distort & Transform > Transform.

The Transform Effect dialog is actually identical to the one that appears when you use the Transform Each function (which we covered back in Chapter 4,

Advanced Vectors ). There is, however, one huge addition in the Transform Effect dialogthe ability to specify copies (Figure 7.71 ).

Transforming Objects with Effects