Everyone, uh, are you ready for the puppet pin tool? It's super awesome. Look, I've got a whale flying  through a UNK city and watch flippity flap, okay? It's a way of adjusting illustrations to different poses. It's called the puppet pin tool. It's awesome.

Let's jump in. Alright, open up this file called puppet pin. Okay? It's a whale that I, uh,  created using the uh, text vector. It's got that look, doesn't it? Okay,  so I've got a whale in a cyberpunk city.

Um, so with the whale selected,  if you wanna use the puppet pin tool, everything  that you want to be kind of like, um,  distorted has to be in a group. So I already grouped it for us. We've gotta find the puppet pin tool. Uh, in the advanced toolbar, you can go  and hold down the free transform and grab puppet pin. Okay? And it looks like this.

If you can't find it,  there's three little dots down the bottom here  and you should be able to find it in here. Where is it? There it is there. Go and just click on it and  what it's done is it's added some pins already  so it just kind of defaults. So they might be perfect. It's pretty good at getting them mostly in the right place.

Um, let's grab this last  one here and just click and drag it. And how cool is that? Okay,  so maybe this pin's not in the right place. You can uh, delete it. So let's say I wanna put another pin there  and click on this one and delete it. Okay, so I've got one in the tail  and that's a bit more flappy whaley thing, okay?

We can't animate it. If you're like, Ooh, can we animate it? You can animate it like this if you record it, but, um,  after Effects has the same tool, okay,  it's called a puppet pin tool, but you can kind of like,  um, animate it over time. Check out my after effects course if you want to do that. But this is really good for like drawing a character  and getting multiple poses out of it rather than trying  to redraw it and all these different kind  of shapes and sizes. Um, with the puppet pin tool,  you can add as many as you'd like.

The more you have, let's say I uh, get rid  of some the least you have,  can you see it's more flexible and kind of more fluid. But if you want to start restricting stuff, if you're like,  actually I want this flipper to move,  can you see it's dragging the body. What you can do is I'm gonna undo  that is you can add a couple of pins there  that will force it to stay in its original spot. Okay, now I can move it  and can you see you just keep wiggling. You're like, why is that moving? Stab that as well.

It kind of jumps back to its original spot  and then you end up with a bit more control. The trouble is, is that can be a little tricky with  so many different puppet pins. Now other things you can do is I'm gonna put a pin in the  fin and maybe one here in the middle of the tail. Um, and 'cause I want it to kind of, it was down,  I want it to be up, okay? And I can start dragging these things around. One of the things you can do is rotate them.

So, um, see this edge here, you can actually kind of,  that one probably doesn't need to be rotated. Probably want one there and rotating it there just  to have a bit more of a, it's kind of getting twisted. So I want to kind of just rotate these around. Oh, if you add one, select it, hit delete, click on this one  and then look for the rotation. Now a couple of more advanced things is that you can't do it  with um, pixels. You have to do it with vector, okay?

That's one thing. Um, you might need lots of different pins  and then you find yourself having too many pins  And, and there you go. He  clearly needs to smile. There you go. And the other thing that is important, oh,  last thing that's, there you go. It needs to be happy whale.

You need a pointy yuppy, uh, fin is you can play around  with the depth kind of. There's no, like in  after effects kind of animated version of um,  illustrator is you can actually click on something  and say, actually I want that to be above. You can't do that. At least I can't find out how  to do this in Illustrator. Okay? 'cause you want the fin above the body not below.

Okay? You want 'em kind of like flipping around that way. Um, so what you can do though is little tricks you can do is  you go back to the direct selection tool, okay? And what you can do, it's all to do layer order, nothing  to do with the pins, okay? So I can select this part of the flipper. I'm not gonna drag it out 'cause it'll break the pins.

The pins are still there, which is cool, okay? But I can say you I'm my layers panel need to be at the top. Who remembers? Well use a shortcut. Remember this little, show me in the layers panel where  that thing is and you can see it's right at the bottom. So I can say you be right at the top.

Okay? And now if I go back to selecting the whole thing, okay,  the whole group back to the puppet pin tool,  they're all still there, but now look, he's above. So the black line is, you know, the black part  of the, I'm calling it a flipper. It's a tail is above his body. So if you do get, I'm not super advanced to this,  but I can really see the benefits if you're an illustrator,  to kind of draw something with kind of like an open gate  and kind of arm sticking out  and be able to, I don't know,  change it into lots of different positions. I could see it for organic stuff  and while that's way too exciting.

Um, other last things, uh,  is under properties you can select all the pins  and delete them if you wanna get rid of them. Okay, I'm gonna undo that. You can show the mesh or not. The mesh just shows you the density. Like you can see there's a lot of tight areas through here. Is it useful?

Kind of. I don't find it that useful. You might like it. Alright, my friends. That is how you get a flying, uh, whale  to do the right things in, uh,  cyberpunk City using the puppet pin tool. Come on, let's get onto the next video.