AggroPixel

Learn how to take Illustrator’s Pie Graph Tool one step further using Illustrator’s 3D Effect and then finish it off with a cool reflection.

Overview

This tutorial will be useful for you or your clients to quickly add more value to those boring pie charts. It works great for powerpoint presentations, business meetings, at-a-glance webpages, and more. This is the end result.

Step 1

Using the Pie Chart Tool () draw a box where you want the chart to go. A new window will popup, don’t close this becaue this is how we will set the percentages. This can be any size since we are in a vector enviornment. Set your colors to whatever, we will change the later anyway.

Step 2

Now we need to set percentages. Starting from the left top cell type in “25″, then click in the second cell in the first row and type “75″. This is what you should get.

Now click the “” button to save your changes, now you can close the popup window. Depending on your colors you should get this.

Step 3

To seperate the sections and set our selves up for extrusion, simply grab the Direct Selection Tool () and then select the smaller section and hold down the “shift” key and it the “up arrow” key once and then the “right arrow” key once. This will offset the smaller section 10 pixels. This is what you should get.

With the Direct Selection Tool () add colors of your choice to both sections. I ended up with this.

Step 4

Using the Select Tool (V) select your entire graph. Under the top menu select Effect>3D>Extrude & Bevel.

A popup window opens use the image below to make sure your setting are similar to mine, really pay attention to every step starting from top and move slowly to the bottom making sure you don’t miss anything.

Once you are satisfied with your shape click “OK” on the dialog box and you should get something like this.

Step 5

To add a reflection select the graph and while holding down the alt+shift keys click and drag a copy of your shape upward. Make sure you positon it so it looks like its resting directly on top. It should look like thisl.

Select the bottom graph and change the Opacity to 35% or whatever works best for your graph.

You should get this. Please comment on this tutorial if it was helpful.