From the course: Drawing Vector Graphics Laboratory

Creating with Free Transform - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Drawing Vector Graphics Laboratory

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Creating with Free Transform

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- [Instructor] Welcome to Drawing Vector Graphics Laboratory. Part of presenting ideas to clients is to help them envision how your design will live and apply in a real world context. So in this movie, I'll show you how you can use the transform tool in Adobe Illustrator to create simple and believable mockups by applying your vector art to stock photography. Now this isn't going to be perfect. I'm going to say that right up front, but it's a time saver. You don't always have to create something that looks so photorealistic. It's just to get a client to see how it could live in the real world. And so that's what we're going to do here. The first is we're going to mock up a design for a billboard. Now there's a few things you need to do upfront that I think makes the process easier. First, let's turn on the graphics we're going to apply to this billboard and this is a design and normally in Illustrator, if I select a shape like this design, I like to have the anchor points handle selected like this. But on this case, this would be the exception. It's 'cause when I'm building is one thing. When I'm mocking up, it's another thing. This, I can hardly see my design. There's so many anchor points. So what we want to do is go to Illustrator preferences. I'm going to go to general and the first thing I'm going to do is normally, I have tool tips turned off, but I have 'em on here just so I can hover over the tool we're going to be using and just showcase what the title is and what it does. So that's the first thing. And I normally turn this off just 'cause it looks nicer in production value for a movie, but in this case, I have it turned on. But the main thing is we're going to go to selection anchor points and this feature which I normally have turned on, show anchor points and selection tool and shape tools, I'm going to turn that off. Also, highlight anchors on mouse over, I'm going to turn that off and show handles on multiple anchors are selected, I'm going to turn that off and that will just make the process easier. So with those set, we're going to click okay and now when I select my shape, I just select the art and you can see it. Now it puts this highlight around the edge of the vector art and I've image traced these textures into this design. That's fine. We're still going to be able to see what we need to see but I don't want it a hundred value. It's going to be easier to align if it's transparent so we can see the shape underneath. But you have to have a vector shape selected. So if I deselect this and I don't have any shape selected and I click on the free transform tool, it'll select the tool, but the palette won't come up. So you have to have the artwork you're going to transform selected first, then click on the free transform tool and then you'll see this little palette show up. That's a little odd in my opinion and I wish this palette would just stick around so I could save it in my workspace for example, but it doesn't. But that's how you need to do it. But notice here, it's also showing the anchor handles even though we have those press settings turned off. That's kind of unfortunate as well. But we're still going to be able to do what we want so let's go ahead and select this, select the free transform. We have different things here. Actually, let's start with a shape here and I'm just going to create a shape. Let's go ahead and color this a blue color like that, select free transform and you can see we have, it's going to default to the free transform and all this does is you can grab anywhere and transform it as you want. Or if you click on constrain, constrain will just do it and keep that proportion exact regardless of what size you drag it to. So I don't really use constrain that much. I mainly use the free transform and the free distort. Perspective distort, if we click on this, you can click here and you can get this perspective like that, a two point perspective. You can do it from any point you want like that. And free Transform is just like it is in Photoshop where you can drag points wherever you want to align with whatever you want. And this is the one we're going to be using the most. So I just wanted to explain that. Let's go ahead and select our art now and let's go ahead and click on free transform and we're going to use the free distort, will be the first one and all I'm going to do here is grab a corner and I am going to mask that. So I just want to distort it so it goes outside the shape here. And then we'll go down here and I'll do it outside, just barely outside the corner at the top here and we'll do the top left, distorting it like this, and we'll do the bottom left like that. Now I don't want to leave it at 50% value, so we'll return it to 100% and you can see how it now looks. Even there without the mask, it looks good but we have a mask that we created precisely based off of the photograph so I'm going to select that, select our artwork. With both selected, I have a keyboard shortcut for mask, which is F1, and that's why I highly suggest you use that because I don't have to go up to the menu and pull down to object in this case and go to clipping mask and make. Notice I have F1. All I have to do is have both selected, hit F1, done. Now that it's masked, I'll now go to transparency and go blend mold, multiply. So if your photograph has a little bit of shading to it, it'll interact with that shading and it'll make it more believable. Now obviously, these are just mockups to give a client context of, okay, here's the billboard design, here's how it could look in the real world. So it's all about kind of bringing them on board to see the vision of where they can go and how it could work in real life. Let's take a look at another example. This is going to be for signage and graphics. Another thing I do, if we want to put their logo, let's say it's a logo we did for a freight company in this case, I'll create a bounding box first that aligns with the vertical edges of the building on the left side and on the right side. And it's the approximate height of the area here that we want to create this logo on. I center it with that shape, with the design we're going to be using, select both of them and with both of them selected, I'll go to the free transform tool. And on this one, I'm going to go to free distort. And so we'll go down here and we'll click on this and then I'm going to grab the top right corner and I'm just going to bring it down here, like that. Then I'm going to grab the bottom and this one will be approximate, so I'll bring it right down, right about there. And this looks really distort. I don't think this works too well. This is where I'll go back to the free transform part of this tool, grab the center on the right side in this case, and I'm just going to drag it over until it looks approximately distorted accurately. And I think that looks pretty good. Once I have that, notice once you do this with the bounding box, it's going to group these together. So just ungroup it and then you can just get rid of the bounding box. Now I'm going to select this and I'm just going to scale this up just so it's the size we want. It's in the proper perspective. I'll line it approximately where I want on the side of that building and then I'll go to blend mode and I'll hit multiply so it interacts with the photo a little more, and looks a little more believable. I'll use the same principle on the vehicle graphic on the side here. Let's go ahead and zoom in on this so you can see what we're doing here. I'll select our design. I'll select the bounding box again, I'll go to free transform. I'm going to go to the free distort. Go to the top here, pull it down. Just align it with the photo, like this and do the bottom edge. But notice if you look at the tires, these tires are perfect circles and when it starts on the front, it's like an oval, like kind of a fat oval. But by the time it gets to the back, it's a very thin oval and this gives you the cue to kind of match that aesthetically because this is a circular shape. So if this is on the same plane in perspective as these tires, this wouldn't be circular. This doesn't look right. So this is where we go to free transform and because we've assigned the kind of perspective of sorts, we can take this and notice it'll follow that top edge of the container in the bottom edge and we're just going to distort it until that oval of the logo approximates the oval on the tires. So something like, probably right around there I think works good. Now we can go ungroup because we don't need the bounding box anymore, so we can get rid of that. Oops. Ungroup it. Deselect the logo. Get rid of the bounding box. Now that we have this, we can size this up too and we'll move it into proper perspective. Kind of like there. Now if you think this part could be adjusted, you can still click on free transform. Maybe we think this edge should be, and this is where perspective comes in, this is where I might adjust it like that. Or if you think it still needs to be distorted a bit, you can grab that and finesse it. So there's a lot of flexibility here. Just do it until you think it feels right. That's kind of what I do. It's all kind of eyeballing it to begin with but when it feels right, it usually is right. So I'm going to go multiply so it interacts with the photo and then the easy one on the door, once again, we want to match kind of the oval in the tire and this where we can just select the shape and just pull in one side to kind of match that same aesthetic. Maybe position it a little differently and then set the blend mode to multiply. And you can do a nice mock up like this if you're presenting logo comps to a client. And you could even take photography of their building if they have a building and you can use that photography to work on. Let's take a look at another building because this is something I didn't even know was possible. I went to hear a friend of mine, Robzilla, great illustrator, talk at the Creative Pro conference and he showed a project where he did this illustration. Two NBA players own a restaurant and they wanted to put this illustration that Rob did of both of them on the side of their building. And so he showed how they wrapped a building. I didn't even know they could wrap a building. I know they can wrap vehicles. I had no idea they could wrap a building. It's pretty cool. They had all these heat guns and they're wrapping it around these pipes going down the side of the building. So we're going to do a building wrap here. So let's go ahead and turn on the graphic we're going to wrap on this building and let's zoom out so you can see what's going on. I'll do that. I'm going to select the artwork and the same thing just so we can see what we're doing, let's knock this down to 50. And you can see the graphic here. So what we're going to do with that graphic selected, we're going to go to free transform. And again, we're going to go to the free distort. We'll grab the top left and we're going to align it with the perspective in the photograph of the building, like this, on the top. And we'll do the bottom like this to align with the photograph like that. Now you might think, well that looks horrible and I would agree. So we're going to click on the free transform, grab the left side and because we've set this perspective already, we can just drag this in and notice it's following that perspective from the top and bottom without distorting it. So we're going to drag this all the way over but I want it to bleed a bit off of the edge, top, bottom and left and right side because we're going to mask it again. The mask is easier to create on its own. So we have a mask set up. Now that we have this, let's go ahead and I adjust the value back to 100% like that. We can zoom in and let's turn on the mask layer. You can see we created the mask to wrap around the windows and the detailing of the siding. So we'll go ahead and select our mask shape, select the artwork, and once again, I use F1 to mask it. Hit F1, it masks it into place and now this is where the magic happens. This is where the blend mode under transparency palette to multiply really kind of breathes life into this. And you can see when we do that, you get the perforation in these panels on the building coming through, the shadow interacts with the detail on the building and it looks really believable. And believe it or not, they can actually wrap a building like this, which I just think is absolutely cool. So once again, this isn't a perfect process. This is to get simple mockups to your clients regardless of what you're working on just to help them see that vision of where they could go with the art and design you're creating on their behalf. Now, there's other ways to do more extensive mockups and I want to show you one resource because it's been a go-to since I ever learned about it. This is a resource that large ad agencies use and they'll hire this company to create these mockups. But the nice thing about this company, anybody can purchase these mockups and the price is really reasonable to get a layered PSD file. So here's a project I worked on. This is the branding, and they do shipping globally through shipping containers and obviously, semi trucks delivering stuff. And so I wanted to show how could this live in the real world on a specific application such as a semi truck. So I bought the PSD file from yellowimages.com. Great service, check it out. And bought the PSD and just simply copied and pasted my art from Illustrator into the PSD to put the graphics on the trailer, on the top, on the door and it really gives the client the full realization of how something could actually live in the real world. They obviously ship on containers so I also got the template for a shipping container and did that as well. So it's a really great resource. Make sure to check it out. Once again, it's yellowimages.com. Obviously, a high end CGI rendered PSD file will produce a more believable result, but for comping purposes, using the transform tool in Illustrator is a simple and easy way to demystify usage for most clients. If you have a question about anything related to design, illustration, the creative process, or maybe something more technical regarding Adobe Illustrator and want me to consider it for an upcoming DVG Lab movie, then send it to questions@dvglab.com. Thank you for watching DVG Lab and until next time, never stop drawing.

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