How to plot a plate with a specific wavy pattern with Adobe Illustrator?

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Can anyone please help me with plotting two kinds of wavy plates using Adobe Illustrator. What in my mind are something like this.
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The first one is a plate with sinusoidal pattern and the second one also with sinusoidal pattern but the wavy striations have an angle with respect to the edge of the plate. In other words, in the right panel, when observed the cross section along the red line, we can see a sinusoidal curve while the black solid/dashed lines stand for wave crests/troughs.

I can find on the site about how to draw a sinusoidal curve but I didn’t find how to draw a sinusoidal plate with a finite thickness.

Thank you very much!

Answer

I’m writing an answer for 2nd type of plate inspired from Billy’s answer and joojaa’s comments.

  1. Create a stroke and apply Effect > Distort > Zig-zag effect and then apply Effect > 3D > Extrude & Bevel. Expand it.

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  1. Rotate it and crop/clipping mask it to create a rectangle with different angle (to apply clipping mask, draw any shape above the expanded artwork, then select both shape and artwork and Object > Clipping Mask > Make)

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  1. Again, apply 3D rotate and perspective to it so it looks somewhat like this or whatever angle you need

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  1. Create 2 more strokes (they can be vertical initially) and apply Zig-zag effect and Perspective effect to both of them. (Perspective and rotate is so that curves seem narrowing at farther end). Experiment with settings for each stroke and move the strokes up and down till it kind of matches with the plate curves. Keep stroke lengths longer than required as it will help while you move it up and down, to properly sync with curves of plate.

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  1. Do the finishing using colors and clipping masks (for clipping mask you’ll need to manually draw a shape which hides unwanted parts and creates curves on father edges of plate).

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Further you can use Photoshop for minor tweaks.

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Note: It will take a lot of time if you aren’t experienced with Illustrator 3D and rotate tool. For example, it took me around 3 hours to do this (my PC is also a bit slow for 3D). The cross section edge still looks a bit flat. I couldn’t figure out a way at this time to make it more realistic but you can experiment.

If you can invest a lot of time and attention to details, you can proceed. Otherwise I think 3D software could be a better solution.

You can try following approach also. When you apply extrude to the zig-zag stroke, rotate it something like this:

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Then expand it, make it vertical and crop it using a rectangle clipping mask.

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You’ll still need to give it some perspective/rotation again (but only a very small amount otherwise it will affect existing cross section and curves) using 3D rotate & Bevel and manually add cross section effect and curves.

Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : Nobody , Answer Author : Vikas

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