Adobe Illustrator 2022 3D Tool Design Social Media Icons

Hi everyone, Simona here from Vector Twist. In today's Adobe Illustrator video tutorial, we'll draw some cool 3D social media icons, a speech bubble and a heart. These icons you can use for any of your designs and they are so realistic 3D looking, you'd think they were created with a 3D software. But instead we can design such 3D assets in Adobe Illustrator 2022. So let's get to it. Choose the Rectangle tool and create a long rectangle on the artboard. Then with the Pen tool add a triangle on the bottom left to make it look like a speech bubble. Then in the Pathfinder combine both together with the Unite. Select the Direct Selection tool and round out the corners. Just make sure you have your Corner Widget on. Then create a circle and place it into the middle of the speech bubble. Switch to the Rectangle tool and create a slim long rectangle in white as well, right next to the circle duplicated and reduce the width. Then again round out the corners. Group those two shapes and then select the circle and make sure they're aligned into the middle. Then we're going to create a person icon for the circle. Create another circle in blue and a rectangle underneath. Then with the Direct Selection tool nudge both sides inwards and then round out the top part, select the bottom and round out the bottom. Make sure the icon is in the center, group it and then we'll group everything together and move it to the side. Now we're going to add some 3D effects to the speech bubble. Open the 3D and Materials panel and select Object. Click Inflate and then bring down the depth to zero and the volume to approximately 25%. The rotation you can set as you like. I'm using 12, minus 25 and then minus 15. Then go to the lighting and change the intensity to 60%. Also the height to 90 degrees and then set the softness to probably about 85%. Now before we add the ray tracing, let's create a graphic style out of these settings first. Open the Graphic Style window and drag the speech bubble onto it. Then double click it and rename it to whatever you like. Now we can apply the same settings to the person icon and since we still have access to the 3D settings because it's a live setting, we can change the settings via the Appearance panel for the icon. Maybe increase the depth to three pixels. Then select the circle and the rectangle and apply the same effect. Again there we can work with the depth and then increase it a little bit. Place it on top of your speech bubble and there we go. Now let's check the ray tracing settings. Right now they're greyed out. All we have to do is turn them on and then we can switch the settings if you click it from screen medium to high. We can set it to transparent, to white background, anti-alias it and so forth. I'm going to leave it as high and then click render. It might take a little bit but now we've applied the 3D render settings. Continue and apply them to the other elements as well. Next select the speech bubble again, go to the lighting setting and turn on the shadows. Under the settings increase the shadow bounce to about 300% and the distance from the object to about 10 or 12. And as you can see now we've created a realistic shadow behind. We'll do the same thing to the icon for the person and there we can work a little bit with the distance of the object and the shadow bounce. You might want to use the same settings, decrease it or increase it. It all depends what look you're going for. At the same time we're going to change the object slightly. Let's increase the volume and maybe even the depth and do the same thing to the circle and the lines. And there you have it, a really cool looking 3D speech bubble. But it's still in vector. And because it was so much fun let's create another 3D shape, a heart. Use the pen tool and set the stroke to a red color then hold the shift key to constrain the angle to 45 degrees. Create a line that is connected that looks like half of a triangle then open up the stroke panel, set the cap to round and increase your weight. Really increase it really high until you see a heart shape on your screen. Now if we go to the graphic style and apply the settings we've added, watch what happens. Everything disappears and it applies the settings from our speech bubble. So if you want to create another new graphic style you would have to start from scratch. But in this case we can work with our 3D settings and we'll just switch it to a stroke in red again and then repeat the step. We'll increase the stroke really high until we see a heart shape again and also make sure that your cap is set to round. Once that's done we can increase the volume under inflate and also set it to the other side. Here I'm just going to show you if you inflate it on both sides when you rotate it you see it's inflated on the other side as well. Let's increase the stroke a little bit more and then we can also work with the lighting. You can go through the presets and see which lighting you prefer. You can alter them as you like, just try it out. I think I'm going to increase the softness a little bit or increase it and also the intensity of the ambient light. And at the same time I'm going to add another shadow again, increase the shadow bounce and here we go. We just created another 3D icon and of course you can still alter the effects. Here's a quick tip if you want to change the size of your heart icon make sure before you resize it that in the scale settings the scale strokes and effects is checked. If not it won't scale it properly. So when you then later on create a copy of your heart and make it smaller it will resize the stroke with it. And that's pretty much it. And then here we go a super cool 3D design in Adobe Illustrator. And now we're at the end of the Adobe Illustrator video tutorial. Please give it a like, subscribe to the channel, share it and leave a comment. I'll see you next time.