3D Text in Adobe Illustrator | 4 Easy Effects

on the previous video of the channel I broke down the 3D and materials panel in illustrator and showed you everything there is to know about it now we're gonna see it in action and create four different 3D effects using typography if you haven't seen the other video yet go watch it now and then come back here alright let's go in this tutorial we're gonna use a lot of different panels so if you don't see some of them they can all be opened through the window menu the first one is a holy fact and it is super easy to make I'm using the Montserrat font and I'm gonna type the word whole but you can type whatever you want and use a different font if you feel like it just bear in mind that this effect works best with a very geometric and blocky font after that and this is an optional step I want to replace my letter O for a big circle to play around with the concept of a Hole by making an actual big hole in the text this will require me to outline the text which I'll do by pressing Ctrl shift o now I'm gonna double click the object to isolate it select the letter O and delete it now I'm gonna press L to select the ellipse tool and draw a circle I'm holding the shift key to draw a perfect circle and the ALT key to draw it from the center and I'll make the circle a bit bigger than the rest of the text just to be more dramatic then I'll adjust the spacing and press escape to leave the isolation mode if you skip the last step this is is where you catch up to be able to make the whole effect we need this object to be a cutout in another object so we'll make a rectangle big enough to cover everything and place it behind the actual word let me change the color so we can see that it is in fact behind you can move objects up or down in the stack by holding Ctrl and pressing the square bracket Keys close moves up and open moves down then we'll select both objects open the Pathfinder panel and use the exclude function this will use the object that's on top to make a hole on the object that's on the bottom now we're ready to move on to the 3D part black is a really hard color to work with in 3D so let's change this to something brighter I'll use red but you can use whatever you want then let's open the 3D and materials panel and select the extrude option in the object tab I'll change the rotation to isometric top on the drop down menu but virtual only any rotation will work for this effect we also need to increase the depth of the Extrusion until you can't see the bottom of the hole anymore then on the materials tab we're gonna increase the roughness all the way to one finally in the lighting tab we're gonna increase the intensity to 140 the softness to 80 and turn off ambient light which will make the Shadows a little darker and increase the contrast both material and lighting settings are personal preference you can mess around with these settings as much as you like to get them to look how you want these are just the settings that I'm using because they look nice but don't restrict yourself to just blindly following tutorials online it experiment for yourself and find what you like once we have everything set up the way we want we can hit the render button now all we need to do is hide everything that is not the hole itself and we'll do that with a clipping mask we'll select the pen tool by pressing the letter P and we're gonna draw a rectangle covering the entire word then we'll select both objects and press Ctrl 7 to create a clipping mask lastly we need to create a background of the same color but as you can see the color is not exactly the same and that's because our 3D object changes colors based on the lighting and material settings after we hit render an illustrator doesn't allow you to just pick the color of the final 3D render using the eyedropper you can see that it picks the color of the object before being affected by the rendering but there is a workaround for this simply take a screenshot by pressing the print screen key on your keyboard and paste it inside illustrator by press in Ctrl V now just select the background and Sample the color of the 3D object from the screenshot instead and there you go the 3d effect is ready if you choose not to replace the letter O for the big circle you can leave the text as a text object which means you can edit the text even after applying the 3d effect just remember to turn off rendering before editing the word needless to say patreon supporters will have special cool extras to download I'll make this illustrator file available for download to make it easier for you to follow along and experiment with the effects it has every effect saved as a graphic style the fonts and vectors I used and the finished projects as well supporting can cost you as low as two dollars and the link is in the description below now back to the video next on the list we have this isometric effect and this one is even simpler let's start by typing our text and outlining it with Ctrl shift o again for this effect a bold geometric font works better I'm using the font Barlow after outlining it we'll change the color to a light gray remember black is hard to work with in 3D and then ungroup the characters by pressing Ctrl shift G or using the right click menu in this effect we'll have two different rotations both on the object and the lighting so we'll have to work on each character individually on the first character we'll select the extrude effect in the 3D panel and set the depth value to something similar to the thickness of the font just so it doesn't look disproportional for me 50 pixels is working fine then on the rotation we'll select the isometric right option on the material tab we'll keep the default material selected but change the roughness to 0.6 in the lighting tab we'll first turn on Shadows set them to below object and increase the shadow bounce then we'll set the light rotation to 0 degrees so the shadow is exactly behind the object increase the height to 80 degrees and the softness to 80 percent finally we'll turn off ambient light to give it more contrast these are the settings that I think look good but as always feel free to play around with them and create your own look will not work on the color of the objects just yet and you'll see why in a bit let's move on to the second character some of the sightings will be the same select the second character add the extrude effect and set the depth to the same value as before on the rotation we'll now choose isometric left instead of right the lighting settings are all the same except for the rotation since our 3D object is rotated 90 degrees now facing to the left we'll have to rotate the light as well so set the rotation to 90 degrees now here's the trick instead of applying all these settings manually on every single character we're gonna create graphic styles to make our life easier open the graphic Styles panel select the first character and hit the plus button on the bottom of the panel double-click the graphic style and rename it to isometric right then do the same thing with the second character and rename it isometric left now you can just select the characters that will be rotated to the right and apply the isometric right graphic style and then do the same thing for the left ones so much much easier right now let's move on to the colors for this effect I chose a rainbow style color scheme and painted each letter with a different color I set the brightness to 100 and saturation to about 50 on all the colors to get these soft pastel tones and then just play it with the heel for each one now before we render it we need to work on the position of the ladders the cool thing about this isometric effect is that you can arrange the characters in lots of different ways this is how I set up mine but you can play around and try new things keep in mind you can always use the shortcut Ctrl and square brackets to move objects up or down in the stack to make them appear in the front or behind each other on the artboard after we're done positioning them we'll create a rectangle covering the entire artboard to work as a background and send it to the back then we can just select one of the letters open the render menu turn on Ray tracing and check the remember and apply to all option and now the effect is ready okay I didn't know how to call this effect so I called it noodle effect anyways the idea behind this one is that you use a very thin and round font so when you apply the 3D you have this perfectly smooth effect all around the 3D object looks a bit like a neon sign as well but unfortunately illustrator doesn't allow us to create objects that emit light for this effect I started out with the fun nickenly but thought it would look nice to add some flourishes so that's what I did you can just outline the text and draw the flourishes using the pen tool adjusting the stroke way to match the thickness of the font though in my case I decided to go a step further and actually draw the entire word from scratch using the pen tool you can use any font for this effect but I think this one fits perfectly because it has a consistent stroke weight really emphasizing that smooth round effect after you have the font outlined and edited the way you want we can start working on the 3D the effect we're gonna use for this one is the inflate effect and the overall 3d effect is pretty simple we're gonna set the depth to zero so it's perfectly round and check inflate both sides for the rotation I chose off axis front but feel free to choose the one you like on the materials tab we'll set the roughness to zero to make good use of the round shape of our 3D object and get those nice Reflections to show as for the lighting we have a lot of options to choose from first though we definitely want to turn Shadows on then we can experiment with just a hard Shadow for that bright sunlight look or perhaps make it softer for a Mars move aesthetic for my final result I'll be using 145 degrees in the rotation 45 degrees on the height 80 smoothness and 2 percent on distance from object then just hit render and you're all set just be careful because complex fonts and shapes can result in slow rendering times and sometimes illustrator can also crash for this wireframe effect we'll once again need a very geometric font we'll start by typing our text and outlining it with Ctrl shift o for this effect we'll use two different 3D objects so make a copy of the outline text by dragging it holding the ALT key and set it aside for now on the first text we'll apply the plane effect and set the rotation to isometric right but like always you can play around with the rotation you want the color is set to a light gray and the base material is set to the default values they won't matter much for this effect then for the lighting we'll need some more specific settings we want a light coming from behind the objects so turn on Shadows change the position to below object increase the shadow bounce and play around with the rotation slider until the light is at the right angle if you're using the same rotation as me set the light rotation to 180 degrees this effect benefits from very soft Shadows so we'll set the light softness to something around 85 percent and turn off ambient light to increase the contrast let's give this a render and see how it's looking and nice we'll leave rendering on for this object since we won't change it anymore now before we work on the second 3D object let's add a background to the artboard just so it's easier to see the wireframe when we place it there I'll add a blue background because this effect gives me blueprint Vibes but use the one you want for the second 3D object we will use the extrude effect set the depth to whatever you want but I'll keep it roughly the same size as the thickness of the font we'll need to set the object rotation to the same as the previous object so in my case isometric right in the second 3D object we don't need to make any changes to the material or the lighting because we just want the wireframe so open the render settings turn on wireframe and click render after that go to the object menu and choose expand appearance now we have the wireframe of the 3D mesh as a vector object and we can start working on it this is a bit of a tedious task I fried my brains trying to think of an automated way to do it but I couldn't come up with anything for this sort of hand-drawn look that we're going for we need every line to be separated from the overall shape which means we have a lot of path splitting ahead of us the wireframe render also doesn't help much since it'll generate lots of overlapping paths which we'll need to delete as well so here's the most optimized way of doing all this first let's make a copy of the wireframe by dragging it holding the ALT key then we'll select a copy ungroup it with Ctrl shift G or using the right click menu select all the back faces of the wireframe and drag them away after that we can select what's left of the copied wireframe and delete it now we'll split all the lines on these objects and we can do this by using the scissors tool shortcut C we'll select the first character and click once on top of each corner of the path which will cause it to split leaving us with individual line we'll do this for all letters of our word after splitting all the lines we'll select everything and group it again using Ctrl G or the right click menu now that we have the back faces of the mesh all broken down we're going to use the original copy of the wireframe as a guide to place the front faces this way we don't mess with perspective we'll just place the back faces on top of the original wireframe make a copy of them by dragging holding the ALT key and position them on top of the front faces after that you can just select the original copy delete it select both the front and the back faces and ungroup them again now we have both the front and the back faces all broken down into individual lines all that's left for us to do is select the line segment tool shortcut backslash and connect the front to the back faces that's the most tedious task so put on some good music and get to work foreign [Music] after you're all done just group everything again so you don't leave lines behind when dragging the objects now we'll change the stroke color to white open the stroke panel and adjust its weight this will vary depending on the size of your 3D object but for me one pixel looks fine then we'll add a stroke profile on the bottom of the panel just open the drop down menu and select the second profile it'll give the sort of hand-drawn look to the stroke making it thinner towards each end after that we'll open the gradient panel make sure stroke is selected and click once in the gradient slider to create a new gradient on the stroke then we'll double click the black color slider change it to White click once again in the middle of the slider to add a new color which will automatically be white and change its position to exactly 50 percent to finish the effect we just need to set the opacity to zero percent on both ends of the gradient then grab the wireframe and place it on top of the 3D objects and now we're done if you enjoyed this video check this other one here I think you'll like it thank you to all my patrons who helped me make high quality content like this one check the links in the description if you want to support the channel or join our Discord server and don't forget to like And subscribe if you have any doubts leave a comment down below and I'll answer it thank you so much for watching and have a great day bye

Channel: Andy Tells Things

Views: 50,916

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Id: R0OzB_H5UIY

Length: 16min 43sec (1003 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 01 2023