Learn how to create rocket exhaust using various tools in a design software. This tutorial will guide you through the process of building and resizing shapes, reflecting and duplicating them, and merging them into a cohesive design.
Key Insights
- Designing rocket exhaust starts with creating rectangles in a new layer and resizing them to match the width of the rocket.
- Next, the rectangle shapes are duplicated and reflected to the other side of the design. This is done by first creating a line, copying the shapes and the line, and then reflecting them.
- Finally, the exhaust is finished with the use of the ellipse and pen tools, which are used to create ellipses and shapes. These are then merged together using the pathfinder tool to form a unified design.
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In this video we'll be creating the exhaust for our rocket. Let's begin first by creating a new layer, and we'll retitle this "Exhaust." Next, let's lock our Traced Rocket layer, and before building our Exhaust layer, we want to unhide our Rocket Sketch layer.
To begin creating our exhaust, we're going to want to create rectangles. To do this, we'll make sure we're in our Exhaust layer, and then we'll utilize our Rectangle tool, making sure to hit D for default fill and stroke settings. If we zoom in, let's create exhaust that's roughly the same size as our rocket. We'll select from one side to the other for our exhaust and release, and then we'll simply drag the top down so that we have an exhaust stream that's the width of our jet on the left-hand side.
From here, we can decrease the width, holding ALT so it resizes from both sides, and we'll minimize the size here. Next, let's do the same thing on the right-hand side for our second exhaust. We'll drag from one anchor to the other and resize, dragging below. Finally, we'll hold ALT again as we resize, and we'll make this one a bit skinnier than the other one.
In addition, we can drag it up a bit, as the exhaust will be behind our rocket image. Next, we need to duplicate these two shapes and reflect them. To do this, let's first create a line using our Line Segment tool, and we'll drag it right from the center down to the bottom, holding Shift. We'll hit V on the keyboard, select the line, and while holding Shift, we'll also select the two exhaust pieces.
We'll hit CTRL+C on the keyboard to copy and CTRL+Shift+V to paste. Next, we'll want to reflect them to the right-hand side, so we'll right-click and go to Transform > Reflect, reflect it vertically, and hit OK. From here, we'll want to move it to the right, holding Shift, and we'll drag it to the right until they intersect.
We'll zoom in here and make sure that they intersect correctly. Finally, from here we have our exhaust streams now finished, and we can delete the two lines in the middle by clicking them and using the Delete key. Next, we're going to make the exhaust below using the Ellipse tool.
So let's zoom out, and we'll change from our Rectangle tool to the Ellipse tool. From here, feel free to create ellipses of your choosing. I'll create multiple circles here, and don't worry too much about doing it exactly like our sketch below.
Feel free instead to be creative and do it as you'd prefer. In addition, right now we simply want to create the original outline and don't have to worry about filling the middle too much, as we'll be creating a shape to fix this. Remember that if you want to move a shape, hit V on the keyboard and simply drag it to its desired location.
Here, we'll finish our ellipses holding Shift. We now have the outline of our ellipses along the border. Next, we'll want to create a shape to give us this direct line.
To do this, we'll utilize the Pen tool. Clicking right along the path of one of our ellipses, we'll click and drag while holding Shift on the keyboard until we intersect with the far-right ellipse. From here, we'll want to create a shape that incorporates all of these ellipses and fills in the space in the middle. Finally, we need to remove the bottom pieces of our shape before we create one ultimate shape.
We'll hit CTRL+A to select all, and we'll utilize our Shape Builder tool. From here, we'll utilize the Shape Builder tool to select the segments at the bottom, and then hitting V on the keyboard, we'll simply delete the bottom shapes. Again, we'll hit CTRL+A on the keyboard to select all, and we'll create new shapes out of these bottom sections.
We may need to zoom in to get a better view of this. In addition, you may see that the Shape Builder tool comes into the next top section, and this can be fixed by going to Stroke and making sure that Align Stroke is set to Center. We'll again hit V on the keyboard and delete this bottom section using the Delete key, and finally, we'll delete this last section here.
Here, we now have multiple shapes, so we'll hit CTRL+A on the keyboard and merge them all together using Window > Pathfinder. With our Pathfinder panel, we can then unite until all the shapes are together as one shape, and we'll give this the default fill and stroke by hitting D on the keyboard to fill it with white. You may see that there's a section left out such as I have here, and we can fix this again utilizing the Shape Builder tool.
Keep in mind that these tools are not exclusive to each other, and we can use the Shape Builder tool as well as our Pathfinder panel, depending on what the need is. Finally, let's create a couple of ellipses on the edges. Feel free to create them wherever you'd prefer, and I'm going to just add a couple in here to give us a more diverse design for our exhaust. We'll hit V on the keyboard and click outside to see a preview.
Finally, we'll move our exhaust below our Traced Rocket, and we can see this. Let's now hide the Rocket Sketch, as we no longer have use for it, and we can now see a preview of our rocket as well as our exhaust. Let's now save our work by hitting CTRL+S on the keyboard to save, and in the next video, we'll begin working on our background.
See you there!