… just one this time.
I started this assignment by finding a movement that I wanted to model and I finally settled on #115 and saved the file as a .png.
the movement I chose
I didn’t think this assignment would be too hard because all I had to do was image trace the .png file right? Nope. It was actually harder than I thought. When I image traced the file as a silhouette, it degraded the image a lot and the lines weren’t actually lines so I couldn’t just shape build the traced image.
image traced. there are weird black blobs and all the defined gears became squiggles
So, after the image tracing idea didn’t work, I didn’t really know how to approach this problem so I looked through the old blog posts to get some ideas. Last semester, Katie used polygons to construct the gears and I thought that was a good place to start. (I actually completely forgot that illustrator could do polygons. )
I started off by making two circles to be the base of the gear and then using a hexagon to trace over one gear tooth. I copied the gear tooth 11 times and then placed them over the original image. Then, I used shape builder to combine all the shapes together into one. After that, I realized that I probably should have used something to evenly space the gears, instead of relying on the image. So, after some googling, I figured out how to use the rotation button and added the teeth exactly 30º apart around the gear base.
first attempt at a gear tooth
first gear, teeth not evenly spaced
second attempt at teeth
using the rotation tool around the center of the base. it places the teeth perfectly evenly around the circle!
After finishing the first gear, I just copied it to make the second one.
new gear
Next up was the outer gears. This actually wasn’t that hard to make. I used circles to make the arcs, rectangles for the straights, and octagons for the gear teeth. After making one gear tooth, I just copied it and evenly spaced it to make the rest. To assemble everything into one part, I used shape maker.
making the teeth using octogons
using circles to make the arcs and rectangles for the straights. this is right before I used shape maker to combine the shapes
The gears! It looks a lot better than the image traced version of the original file.
Overall, this assignment was more difficult than I thought but I definitely know illustrator a lot better now. I may even like it. However, I don’t think anyone should hand make their gears on illustrator. It is probably more efficient to use a gear generator online. Also, shape maker may be my best friend.
link to the final version of the movement:
