How to Create Sheet Rolls with Custom Spirals
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In this tutorial, I’ll explain how to make custom spirals (apart from the default spiral tool), and use them creatively in making rolls of paper. So far, I came to know that the spiral tool does not allow a uniform decay (equal spacing) between each wind of a spiral. In this tutorial, I will expose some basic tricks to do so. Hope you find it interesting.
Final Image Preview
Below is the final image we will be working towards. Want access to the full Vector Source files and downloadable copies of every tutorial, including this one? Join Vector Plus for just 9$ a month.
Video Tutorial
Our editor Sean Hodge has created this video tutorial to compliment this text + image tutorial.
Step 1
Create a new document and enable the Smart Guides (Command + U). With the Ellipse Tool (L), make a circle of 40px by 40px as shown.
Step 2
Create five more copies of this circle with uniform increment of 10px on each circle (30px by 30px, 40px by 40px, 50px by 50px, and so on). Align them vertically and horizontally center, as shown.
Step 3
With the Scissors Tool (C), click once on each of the anchor points shown in the red region to cut the joints. This will separate the semi-circles.
Step 4
With the Selection Tool (V), select the upper bunch of semi-circles and group them (Command + G). Similarly, group the lower bunch of semi-circles, as shown in the figure below.
Step 5
With the Selection Tool (V), hold the right-most anchor of “Group2″ and drag it onto the second-last anchor of “Group1.” This will make the rest of the anchors automatically overlap on the anchor points of “Group1.” This needs to be done precisely as we will be joining these anchors in the next steps. Make sure the Smart Guides are enabled (Command + U). Smart guides will automatically snap the anchor on the correct position.
Step 6
Select both groups and Ungroup them (Command + Shift + G).
Step 7
Now we are left with two spirals that are winding into each other. You may delete any one spiral. Start from the left side, select the outermost arc and delete it. Follow its locus and delete all those arcs that are in its path, as shown in red below.
Step 8
Now let’s join the arcs. With the Direct Selection Tool (A), drag a selection over the junction of anchors (to select two anchors at once) and press (Command + J). Select Smooth and press OK. Follow this steps to join each of the anchors (shown in the red zones).
Now we are left with a clean spiral with uniform decay and spacing. You might be wondering why we did all this instead of using a default Spiral Tool. Apparently, I’ve noticed that the Spiral tool doesn’t allow us to create uniform spacing across each wind. There is lot more we can do with this custom technique.
Step 9
Select the Spiral and change its stroke color to white with no fill.
Step 10
With the spiral still selected, go to Effect > 3D > Extrude & Bevel and enter the values as shown in the image below. Try experimenting with different perspectives, light sources, and angles.
Step 11
Let’s work on the orange paper band next. Use the Ellipse tool (L) to draw a circle that is 70px by 70px, then give it a stroke color of orange with no fill.
Step 12
Next, with the Scissors Tool (C) and Delete Anchor Point Tool (-), chop this circle into a semi-circle as shown.
Step 13
Select the semi-circle and go to Effect > 3D > Extrude & Bevel. Next, enter the values shown in the image below.
Step 14
Place the 3-D band on your sheet roll in such a way that its empty part gets covered by the body of roll.
Step 15
Now we’ll create the drop shadow. With the Pen tool (P), draw a trapezium (with fill color 20% K) and send it to the back (Command + Shift + Left Bracket key).
Step 16
Select the trapezium, go to Effect > Blur > Gaussian Blur and enter 20 for the radius.
We can further play with the look and feel of this result, but the main objective of this tutorial is to show the construction of custom spirals. So I will step towards creating another interesting roll with easy yet tricky steps.
Step 17
Take the copy of all concentric circles that we made in Step 2. Next, spread them apart from each other as shown. This is done to avoid confusion while we are working on any particular circle.
Step 18
Now we’ll work on chopping quadrants. Start from “Circle 1.” With the Scissors Tool (C), click once on each of the anchors shown in red.
Step 19
With Selection Tool (V), click on the chopped arc and delete it.
Step 20
Repeat steps 18 and 19 for each circle. Make sure you chop the quadrants in counter-clockwise direction as shown below. The end result should be something like this.
Step 21
Now we’ll work on joining the arcs. With the Selection Tool (V), hold the red anchor of “arc2″ and drag it exactly onto the red anchor of “arc1,” as shown in the figure below.
Step 22
With the Direct Selection Tool (A), drag a selection over the junction of these two anchors and press (Command + J). Select Smooth and press OK.
Step 23
Now hold the red anchor of “arc3″ and drag it exactly over the red anchor as shown.
Step 24
With the Direct Selection Tool (A), drag a selection over the junction of these two anchors and press Command + J. Select Smooth and press OK.
Step 25
Like we did in the above steps, hold the red anchor of “arc4″ and drag it exactly over the red anchor of the resulting figure and join it (Command + J).
Step 26
Similarly, hold the red anchor of “arc5″ and drag it exactly over the red anchor of the result figure and join it (Command + J).
Step 27
Finally, hold the red anchor of “arc6″ and drag it exactly over the red anchor of the result figure and join. The final result will be a non-uniform Spiral, something like a hand-rolled strip.
Step 28
With the Line Segment Tool (Back Slash), draw a Line of 60px width. Join it with the end point of the Spiral and give a stroke of white color to the resulting figure.
Step 29
Go to Effect > 3D > Extrude & Bevel and enter the values shown below.
Try playing with different light sources and perspective to obtain the best result. Below are some results that I came up with after various experiments.
Spiral Concept
The figure below shows the concise steps needed to draw spirals manually, using the procedures shown in this tutorial.
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What an amazing tutorial!
wonderful work
Thanks a lot
gooooooddd
Awesome man! just what I needed
WOOOOOOOWWWWW!
It’s wonderful! Tutorial level “master-piece”
It rocks!
lol thats one useful tut!!! more of this hot stuff pls!!! v v nice
its a great and more powerful tutorial. and fully detailed one. i like it. and i learned new techniques. thanks for sharing your knowledge with us
oh awesome oO!
Great tutorial thanks
Very interesting tutorial
Thanks,
wooooowwwwww
Really amazing……
thanks for the screencast Mr.Sean…
Looks forward to see more screencasts from u….
Vectortuts must override psdtuts videos soon…
You do realize you could have just used the spiral tool that illustrator comes with and then expanded it and scaled it? I mean, I would really like to see better tutorials on this site.
That’s actually not true. You can’t get a uniform decay with the Spiral Tool. Scaling it doesn’t change that. Now you can certainly create a spiral and apply similar 3D effects to it. It’s simpler, which is good, but if you want to control the decay uniformly, then this method works really well. Thx.
Also, thanks Lawrence for the positive response to the screencast. I hope they are helping people out. I like doing them. Thx.
Its my pleasure Sean….
Yeah its nice thanks for doing that….
Hey Guy with needs. Do you even BOTHER reading the intro, or do you just look at the pics?
The author said from the start you can use the spiral tool, but you can’t get uniform decay with it.
Next time, READ before posting a USELESS comment.
nice…
Hello.
I’ve followed the tutorial, and i can’t make the second one to work. All it gives me is a black fill of the spiral.
I just only have color in the line… not in the background, so i dont know what i’m doing wrong
Top level.
Nice effect. I love it!
A-M-A-Z-I-N-G! A wonderful effect with little things. Couldn’t believe, that this will be so easy… I remember times… I had to make this without filters and so on… -.-”
Thanks everybody
Sean,
What an awesome screen cast. Thanks for your efforts in rendering the tutorial so nicely.
man, now it look soooooooo easy
thanks
wonderful work
the very good artwork
Thanx man, nice tut! Keep working!
Bookmarked !
i kinda get lost hahaha this is way advance for me… but again nice tutorial and guide from a nice and great guy! thanks!
That’s an excellent tutorial. A million thanks for sharing.
why thank you ghana man
immense thankyou i ve done 10-20 tut s on ai and just purchased ai cs4 pretty cool dont youknow any way im gettin the hang of it preety commensense if you ve mastere photoshop like me just vector vector is infinitly scalable don t you know that and ai c4 is waynus better than ai 10 – an inkscape although inkscape is fun its what i do for fun btw real high end programs like 3d s tudio max and ps cs4 man
woah! you really spent time doing this for the idiots that the rest of us are. thanks a ton man! may your tribe increase. this is an yum-amazing tutorial.
nice work man, its really amazing!!!!!!!!!!!:)
amazing work!
Thank you for this wonderful tutorial, it really gave me some useful knowledge.
Only problem that i had and maybe it is on your sample pictures as well (can’t see it well it is a bit small) is that the bottom of the band on the first sheet roll isn’t “turning behind” the sheet, its inner side can be seen so the geometry isn’t perfect.
Anyway it is a really good one, so thank you again!
Realy wonderfull, I’m gonna to do it right now.
from Wikipedia: “(an) Archimedean spiral is distinguished from the logarithmic spiral by the fact that successive turnings of the spiral have a constant separation distance (equal to 2πb if θ is measured in radians), while in a logarithmic spiral these distances form a geometric progression. AI’s spiral tool creates logarithmic spirals, while the kind of spiral that looks like it has concentric circles is an archimedian spiral. A shortcut to create a spiral like this ( an approximate archimedean spiral) can be found here on this website: The author is Hiroyuki Sato. Using this script instead of the process in steps 1-3 can save a lot of time in terms of getting set up for this tutorial. There are a number of cool scripts on Mr. Sato’s site.
the best and clear tutorial I ever seen
good tutorial but
i want to know how to change the colour of the paper in easy way
(i’m beginner, and sorry for my english)
@lee
Select the spiral and change its stroke color from white to any other color you want. You are done!
okay looking finished image but basically the 3D filter is doing all the work.
Easy to understand your detail presented of instruction that useful icon.
Thank you for sharing.
Cool and awesome!!! Thanks a lot
Thanks for nice tut, I’ve learned some new technics again and that’s what I’m looking for!
well I got a problem with step 8, because it wasn’t possible for me to join all the paths, only the outermost with its next were able to join, because i couldn’t select the anchors of the other ones without moving them and if i selected every anchor at one go I got an error message that says “for joining two endpoints of open paths must be selected. if they do not belong to the same path, they must not be part of a textpath or a diagram, if they are a group, they must belong to the same group.”
I’ve read through the comments and I don’t think anyone has pointed this out yet. You can definitely do this with the spiral tool. Hold down ctrl or cmd while drawing the spiral and you can constrain the uniformity of the spiral. Hold down alt or opt and you can control the amount of spirals. Hope this helps..
Hi Alex,
With Command or Opt key, you can control the windings, but still the spacing between each wind will be different. I suggest you to try it again. Thanks for your concern
good tutorial
YEAH! VERY GOOD! I AM FROM COTE D’IVOIRE IN WEST AFRICA.
wow!!!!!gr8 nd amazing …it rocks yaar..