From the course: Illustrator 2023 Essential Training

Transform options - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator 2023 Essential Training

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Transform options

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- There are five specific transformation tools inside of Illustrator. What we're going to do here is select this airplane, and then just drag it to another place. There you go. That's effectively a transformation. It's a move transformation, but you don't see a move tool. Let's go ahead and drag this plane over to the one side or the other of the board. I'm suggesting the left if you want to follow the numbers. I'm going to do in a second. So we have the plane just here, and we know that we're doing that via the selection tool. We're doing a move operation. If we hit return, we can access a dialogue for this, and it's the same thing for all of the specific transforms. So let's say we wanted to move this by a specific amount. Now this is around about 70 millimeters wide, and I'm working in millimeters. Don't worry if you are seeing i n or anything else there, because as long as you type mm, you'll be fine. So let's change this to maybe 85 mm. Okay. You don't need the mm, if it's already saying mm in there by the way, and vertically, we'll move it by let's go minus 10, which will move it upwards. Okay, and you can see the distance there that it's going to move. Now at this point, if we were to click okay, or hit return on our keyboard, it would do just that. It would move this plane across, but if we hold down the alter option key, and then hit return, that's exactly the same as hitting the copy button at the bottom of the move dialogue. Which is a nice way to effect a transformation, and we can also repeat that transformation using the transform again shortcut. That would be command D like so, or control D on windows. Every time you hit that shortcut, it will go ahead and create you a copy, and you can also find that in the transform sub menu of the object menu at the top of the screen. So let's have a look at some of the other transformations here. So if we select another plane, let's tap S on our keyboard, which gets us the scale tool. Now you can click and drag with the scale tool. If you hold down shift, you will keep your scaling proportional, and if you look carefully, you can see there's a small target in the center of that. It's the transformation point. So it means it will transform about that point. Let's go ahead and move the point just by clicking over to the left hand side of the wing here, and now you'll see that the transformation is occurring from there. In the same way as you did with the move tool, you can also hit return to apply your scaling numerically. Let's just hit escape to leave that dialogue, and you can do it from a specific point. So if I went to the nose of the plane here, held down alter option and clicked, that does two things. It sets the transformation point, and then opens up the dialogue, so I can do things by the numbers if I want to do that. Okay, I'm not going to create a copy here so I'm just going to hit return. Let's go ahead and select the next plane here, and try for some rotation. That's tap R for rotate, and again, you can drag that around like so. You can also option click for the dialogue, and then enter a number of degrees. Now let's go for the next one, which is reflect. So we could do that actually on any one of these, but I think I'm going to temporarily select this plane just here, and then tap O on the keyboard. Now if you drag, you might not notice at first too much that's different. Okay, but if I deselect, have a look now at the scarf of the pilot, you can see it's reflected to the other side. Let's do that with the dialogue. So tap over the tool option, click beneath the plane, and this time choose to reflect it horizontally. Although you can see you can do that vertically, and also by any specific angle and create a copy, and there you go, and the last transformation is sheer. That doesn't have a key you can press, but if you tap S on your keyboard to get to the scale tool, and then long press, you can access the sheer tool, and what I think I'll do here is just option click just at the nose, I'm going to enter a sheer angle of 30 degrees, just there you can do it via different axes as well. So horizontally, or vertically, or by a specific angle, let's hit okay and there we are. That's how we can affect all of those different transformations using the specific transform tools, and also how we can use the transform again shortcuts to create copies of our transformed objects.

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