Make a 3D grid with fireworks

Tutorial Ease Level: Beginner

Key tools and commands: Edit Grid, Rectangel, Delete Point

Description: Opens the grid function to draw multiple spaces with a grid of rectangles, then delete the same vertex of the rectangle, you can appear similar to the 3D mesh effect of the pattern, after the effect you can fill it with a variety of gradient, apply some real-time effects, make it a different look ...

Figure 1

Specific production methods

Friends who have used freehand may know that there is a ready-made 3D grid tool in Freehand that you can use to create the arrangement of three-dimensional objects. Although there is no such tool in fireworks, you can create a 3D grid yourself, which is not a difficult task, as you will see in this tutorial.

First we start with the file>new menu command in fireworks to create a new 300*300 pixel size file with a white canvas color.

Using menu commands: View>grid>edit grid, when the Edit Grid Edit Grid dialog window is open, we can specify the grid display color in the color selection, where I choose light blue. Tick the two options show gird and Snap to grid. The following two options are used to set the grid between the top and bottom spacing, the default is 36 pixels, you can change this value, this example is set to 30 pixels, click OK button.

Figure 2

At this point you just created a new file canvas will be tiled by the blue grid, which is the appearance of the mesh, the grid is only a helper, convenient for your object positioning, will not appear in the final image object.

Figure 3

In the fill fill panel, set the fill color to none, switch to the Stroke stroke panel, set the stroke type to pencil, the stroke name to 1-pixel soft, and the stroke color to black. (If you don't have these panels in your current software, you can find them in the Window menu and open them). If you don't see any rulers in your files, use the menu view>rulers to open the display of the ruler, and then drag the four guides from the ruler to the position shown in the following figure (four green lines), where the four green guides are surrounded by a square of a 8*8 column, Here's what we do in this square. Select the rectangle Rectangle tool in the tool panel, draw a rectangle in the first column of the square, and because the snap adsorption function of the grid is turned on, it is convenient to align the objects now drawn to the grid. The second rectangle is then drawn, the second rectangle is lower than the first rectangle and one column wide, and the first rectangle is aligned to the left and bottom. The other rectangles, and so on, ... This draws 8 rectangles, and the 8th rectangle is drawn in the bottom row, accounting for all 8 columns.

Figure 4

Select menu commands view>grid>show grid and view>guides>show guides to close all the grids and guides that you just opened. The 8 rectangles we have just drawn are clearly displayed, as shown in the following illustration.

Figure 5

Because the default rectangle in fireworks is a composite object, not a separate path, now we want to split the rectangle. Use the shortcut CTRL + A to select all of these rectangular objects and then apply the menu command Modify>ungroup so that each rectangle becomes a separate path.

Select the white Arrow tool in the tool panel, select the first rectangle, click a point in the upper-right corner of the rectangle, and then select the point, which becomes a small, solid rectangle. Press the DELETE key on the keyboard to delete the point.

Figure 6

And so on, delete the point in the upper-right corner of each rectangle, so that your graphic will look like the following illustration. Look, the 3D grid effect is not out? Does it feel a little bit simple:

Figure 7

These are just a 3D grid effect implementation, in practical applications, you can add a lot of effects to the object to transform it into another pattern, as shown in the following figure, I just filled it with a linear gradient, copy rotation 180 degrees. You can try to add other effects to it ...