Create an Isometric 3D Text Effect in Adobe Illustrator

2.4 Adding Layers and Colour

Hey there, welcome back to the course. In this lesson, we're not only going to be adding color to our design, but we're actually going to add this layered effect to our isometric text. So we'll jump back into it now. Okay, so I'm gonna start by going up to File, and down to Save, like a good boy just in case anything happens. So we've got our isometric text here. What I'm going to do is select this and I'm gonna go up to Window, down to Swatches. And I've got my swatch panel docked up here in my workspace, and we've got lots and lots of colors. So, let's pick a color, we'll double-click on this one here, it doesn't matter what color you pick. The important thing is that you check Global. Now what Global allows us to do, is if we check Swatches Global, if you update that swatch at any point, every instance of that color will be updated throughout your entire document, so it's a fantastic way to work. I highly recommend it and that's what we're gonna be doing in this video. So we have our global Swatch, you can give it a name there if you like, click OK and you can see it applies that color to our text. Now what we're going to do is go up to Effect, down to 3D and Extrude & Bevel. And you'll see this window pop up here. And I can turn on the Preview button. So we'll check that and it makes our text 3D, gives it some depth. It's all at a bit of a weird, wonky angle. So what I like to do is we'll just reset all of these, that's the x, y and z axes, we'll set that back to zero. So it's exactly as it was, and we could crank up the extrude depth as well just to make it a bit more obvious. So you can adjust these values here or you can click on these and adjust the angle or you could hover over this cube here and adjust the rotation that way. So I'm gonna click on the bottom where the red lines appeared. This is going to rotate just over this axis here. So I'm just gonna bring this up ever so slightly. The extrude depth is a bit much, so maybe I'll change that to 100. Maybe we go for 150, so you can fine tune this. You could make it massive if you [LAUGH] want some really tall text. [MUSIC] And what we can do is if I bring this up here, we can actually, go more options. [MUSIC] And we get a few more options. So we've got plastic shading. You could have no shading. Or you could have diffuse shades and you get lots of different types of how the 3D effect can shade. What we're actually going to do is we're going to select no shading. So now, it looks like this. We'll click OK, and you can see it looks terrible. We can't actually determine where the top is, the top surface, or the sides are. But if we select everything and go to Object > Expand Appearance. [MUSIC] And we can go into our outline mode. Remember, that's Cmd or Ctrl+Y. If I just scale this up a little bit, we now have a 3D wire frame view of our letters. So if I select this, it's all grouped together, if I go to object and ungroup. You may need to do this more than once as a shortcut key that I will do it a few times. I can now take these letters on top. [MUSIC] And if I hold Shift on the keyboard and press the up arrow key a number of times, I can lift those off, like so. Now what I'm going to do is drag over everything underneath. Now in outline mode you can see these are just lots of random shapes. It's a bit messy. We're gonna clean this up and make it one shape. So if we go to Window, down to Pathfinder and select unite, that's the top left option, it will combine all these random pieces into a single shape. There we go, just like that, one single click, and we're done. So I can come back out of outline mode. And if I just select my word up here, I can hold Shift and use the down arrow key. And nudge this all the way down. Now I like to use this little shifting nudge technique because it allows me to just hold Shift, use the arrow keys to move something out, make some changes, and then move it back. I know it's going in exactly the same place it started. You could manually drag it out and then drag it back in, but there's always that chance that it's just not going to be exactly where it was before. So, that's why I do that. And then we can go object and group. So we'll group that surface together so it now will moves around. And then if I select the side, the depth essentially, what I can do from the color picker is double-click on this. And I'm just going to go down, make that a little bit darker. Something like that just to bring back that depth. Okay, so we've got some isometric text, we've added some depth to it. Next I'm going to select this darker color and go to edit > copy > edit > paste in place. You've got some shortcuts there. And again, hold Shift and use the down arrow key to nudge that down. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna go up to my swatch panel and add another color. So I'll just double-click on another swatch, Check preview, check global of course and adjust the sliders say something like this. I'm gonna have it graduating from this lighter color to some darker colors. It's gonna be quite a nice gradient hopefully. But with the global swatches, I can always fine tune that at the end. So we'll just zoom in. And I'm just gonna position this just so it lines up, we'll zoom in nice and close. Now, at the moment, you can [LAUGH] see this is actually on top. So what you can do is go to object > arrange > send to back, and it will put that darker shape behind everything. And if I select that again, I'll go to Edit and Copy. But this time I'll go to Edit > Paste in back. So that's what I probably should have done because it will paste this behind everything else. And then I can again move that down. [MUSIC] Double click another swatch, check Global. Click OK And just repeat the process. So we're just copying, pasting it behind, shifting it down a little bit, finding another swatch, making that a global swatch. [MUSIC] And there we go. So we've got one more we're doing. That last one, I'm just doing with shortcut keys there. When you repeat this process over and over again, you'll learn the shortcut keys for sure. [MUSIC] So there we go. So I've just done that really quickly. And now I've just got to fine tune all these distances. I'm just going to get them as close as possible just so we don't get any kind of any white gaps like that. We want this to be nice and tight, you can of course zoom in thousands of percent to ensure maximum accuracy [MUSIC] So there we go, I can pop up back in the center and you can see we have a few little oddities happening here, so if I click on this one, the purple seems to be in front. So if I just go to Object > Arrange > Send to back. There we go, so that seems to have fixed it. So when you have this many layers, it can get a little bit complicated, but remember, you've got that object and the arrange option up there. So you can just move certain objects in front of others or move other ones behind. And one last thing we're going to do is just go and fine tune those colors. So remember, we have these as global swatches. So we can double-click on the swatch, check preview and I can fine tune this. [MUSIC] Something like that, so it's gradually getting darker and going more from like a turquoise teal color through to a purple. [MUSIC] So here we go, something like this and then the last one. [MUSIC] Make that even darker. [MUSIC] And that's the beauty of these global swatches is you really do get maximum control to fine tune that as much as you like. Click OK. So there we go, we've taken our isometric text, we've made it 3D with some layers, we've added color with global swatches. And in the next lesson, we're going to be adding some shadows, just to give everything a bit more depth.