Discover how to create and align windows for a building design using the rectangle tool and other functions in this comprehensive guide. Learn about duplicating elements, aligning, and the essential shortcuts to enhance your efficiency and precision in design.
Key Insights:
- The rectangle tool is used to create windows for a building design, ensuring a white fill with no stroke for clarity. For efficiency, these windows are duplicated by holding alt and dragging to the left until all windows are completed.
- To maintain alignment, features such as 'align to selection' are utilized, ensuring all windows are vertically aligned and horizontally distributed. Any misalignment can be corrected by using the keyboard to inch over the elements, redistributing and re-aligning as necessary.
- The 'ctrl-d' shortcut is especially helpful in duplicating layers from below and moving them above, thus filling the windows for the building. Furthermore, the 'transform each' function allows the designer to adjust each window individually, providing versatility in the design.
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in this video we'll be creating the windows for our building. Let's first begin by locking our building layer and next we'll be dragging our city jpeg layer on top so that we can get a preview of our windows. From here let's add a new layer and we'll title this layer windows and hit ENTER.
In order to now create these windows we're going to be utilizing the rectangle tool and we'll make sure that we have a white fill with no stroke. From here we can zoom in and begin creating our windows. We'll draw a square roughly over the window that we already have and remember to hold shift to maintain the square proportion.
We'll release right about there. And now to duplicate this window we'll hold ALT and drag to the left. We'll do the same thing again holding ALT and clicking and holding ALT until we've completed each of our windows.
Don't worry about them being too much in line as we'll be aligning them once we've finished our last window. Next we're going to use the shortcut v on the keyboard or selection tool and drag a selection box over all of our windows. From here we'll go to alignment making sure we're in align to selection and we'll be aligning our windows so they all have vertical align on the bottom as well as making sure that they're all horizontally distributed.
From here we can see our windows are aligned correctly however for this window I'm simply going to inch it over a little bit with our arrow key and re-selecting the windows redistribute and re-align to the bottom. We now have our bottom row of windows. In order to make this an efficient process to create all of our windows let's now select all the windows we've just created and holding ALT we'll click and drag right above doing our best to align them to the windows above and holding shift so that we drag only vertically.
We'll then release and we have our second row of windows. While we could complete this process going all the way up the building instead let's go over the shortcut CTRL D. CTRL D essentially redoes whatever the last action you just took was therefore hitting CTRL D again will again duplicate the layer from below and move it above.
If we continue hitting CTRL D we'll see that we'll begin filling the windows for our building. In this case it looks like my windows are a little bit off as each additional row is put in a little bit high and you may also have this situation or depending on if yours were put in a little bit low they may be a bit lower. In order to fix this let's hit CTRL A on the keyboard and holding shift as we drag down we'll see that our windows are now lined up from the top to bottom and dragging to the right holding shift we can now line them up on the right hand side.
While they don't perfectly match the windows below we'll see that they're close enough and in the case of this building image it doesn't have to be perfect. Let's next hide our jpeg city as we're now done using this jpeg and don't need to see it anymore. In addition we also need to delete a couple of our windows deselect and now selecting these windows we can simply delete them using the delete key.
From here we have all of our remaining windows. Depending on how yours are aligned on the building you might need to move them over. I'll hit CTRL A on the keyboard and using the keyboard I'm just going to move them over slightly away from the edge using the right arrow key and we've now finished our windows.
Let's zoom out. If we'd now like to make modifications to our windows we can do so giving them a different shape. While we could do this simply selecting one window and either rotating it or resizing it or doing any other transformations we can do this in bulk by hitting CTRL A to select all of our windows and then go into object, transform, and transform each.
From here we'll see that we have our transform each options and by adjusting each of these characteristics we can adjust each window individually. For example if we increase our horizontal and click preview we'll see that our windows are modified in this way. We can make vertical changes as well and even move our windows.
Let's reset these to zero and feel free to make whatever changes you'd prefer. For me I'm going to have a little bit more of a vertical window and in the case of these windows I'm going to move them down slightly and over slightly. I'll leave my windows right about here and I like the look of this.
Again feel free to make whatever changes to your windows that you'd prefer utilizing transform each. We'll then click ok and we've now finished our windows. Let's hit CTRL S on the keyboard to save our work and in the next video we'll be adding additional small buildings to our skyline.
See you there!