Using Live Shape Effects in Adobe Illustrator CC

Welcome, friends. In this video, we are going to look at Live Shape Effects. Basically it makes Pacman. It allows you to add and remove sides to Polygons quite easily, like that. We'll go a little bit further, and make a Pie chart doughnut thing. Let's go and learn Live Shape Effects in Illustrator. 

So Live Shapes are only on a couple of objects. So there's the Ellipse and the Polygon Tool at the moment. Let's look at the Ellipse first. I'm just going to drag out an Ellipse. I've got a Fill, and 'no' Stroke. Now, what we're looking for is, see this little target at the side, that's our little guy. Doesn't really matter what tool you're using, but look, I can drag up, and drag down. Pacman, but probably better used for maybe a Bar graph. There's couple of options you can do. Obviously I can drag these around randomly, just pick kind of a custom shape, or you can type them in. The Transform Panel wants to open up by itself or, at the top here, if you've got the Control Panel open there's one called Shape. We end up with the same kind of options. 

What we can do over here, probably the most important is, you can invert the Pie and type in specific degrees. You can decide exactly what you want to do. The other thing-- let's have a look at the Polygon Tool. It's the other one that works. It's the same kind of thing. This one here has got like this targets on the outside. They decided to style this slightly differently. See this random tile? There's ones in all the corners. Let's randomly put this guy here. You can see, plus and minus, basically it allows you to—

I'm going to drag it left and drag it right, add more sides, or move both sides. I use this mainly just to make triangles. Drawing triangles with a Pen Tool is surprisingly hard. Four sided… you can see what we're doing there. Any other options for the Polygon? You might decide over here, it's easy just to actually pick the size. And that's about it. You can play around with the corners. This here is the Corner Options. You can say I want rounded corners, or increase them up. You can see, the corner's kind of getting round but you can just use this tool as well. We've used this Corner Options in an earlier video. Probably a quicker way of doing it. 

Now what we'll do is we'll make a Pie Graph like we saw at the beginning, because that's kind of cool. There's a full on graphing section in this advanced course. So go check that out if you're doing lots of graphs. If you just want a quick Pie Graph, this is going to work perfect. One of the things as well is, say you want to get rid of it, you just double click these guys. Kind of turns it back to a regular old circle. Then you can pull them out again, double click him to go back. What I'm going to do is start with that curve that's going to be the base of my Pie. Copy and paste it, so I've got another version. Then I want to work out some percentages. 

Your Math might be a lot better than mine. I don't know why, Math I find is quite hard But I've got some tricks, right? You might be the same as me, you might be like, "Tricks are good." I find, if I need to make a slice that's maybe 15%, say I've got given some data, and it says I need to slice it 15%, I find this really handy. We know that the full degrees is 360, right? But if you times it, so do a little bit of Math on these guys. Times is the '*' key. Then you times it by point, whatever the measurement is, '*.15'. So '*.' And we'll put a period, whatever you call it. It just converts that to be right, so 54° is 15% of 360. Man, I'm getting everybody lost. Let's try one more time, let's say I want one more slice that's 30. So all I do is go '360*0.3', which is 30%. And there you go, those are slices. I'm going to color them. Here we go. Lovely. 

I'm going to stack them on top of each other, so I've got this guy and they snap into places pretty cool, pretty easy. I find them building separately is easier than trying to do them on top of it. One thing is, I need to rotate this one around. So I'm just going to rotate it around, and it should snap into place. That snaps easily. 15, 30, whatever is left. Another thing I did do in the intro bit is I kind of made it into a doughnut. So what we're going to do is grab the-- actually what I'll do is grab this guy, copy it, remember, what's the shortcut to paste directly on top? Because if I go 'Command V', just puts it in the middle of my stage, or 'Control V' on a PC. You remember what it is, it's 'Command F' on a Mac, or 'Control F' on a PC. So I've got two of them now right on top of each other. I'm going to make this one a bit smaller. Now I'm going to grab the top corner. I'm going to hold down two keys, I'm going to hold down 'Shift' to make sure it stays the height and width, but also the 'Option' key on a Mac, or the 'Alt' key on a PC. So we got this guy. Nothing matches, I'm going to change the color just so you can see it. Doesn't really matter what color it is, or whether you change it. 

If I select it all, back to our 'Width Tool', which is, 'Shift'-- not the Width Tool, I say that a lot, right? It's the Shape Builder Tool, so 'Shift M'. I'm going to just delete these guys in the side here. That kind of gives me that kind of cool doughnut shape. And because they're all separate, I can maybe do a pullout like that. Actually, I'm going to select it all, 'Shift M'. I'm going to click on this guy once. What it really does is it kind of just slices it out from the guy behind him. We're going to do something like that. Goodbye, Polygon. I'm going to add some text. I'll do that by myself; you can add text. All right, that is for Live Shape Effects. I hope it starts applying to things like the Star, that would be a cool addition. You might do, in the versions that you're using, in the future. For now, it works for Ellipses, and it works for Polygons. All right, let's get on to the next video.