Tutorial: Create a 3D pie chart with illustrator

1 July 2009 2 Comments

Are you tired of using 2D pie chart in your PowerPoint? Follow this tutorial, you can try to create an attractive 3D pie chart with illustrator.

Step one: Prepare data for you pie chart

Select the Pie Graph Tool, and click on the artboard. Enter 300×300 pixel. Create new document

After that, a graph data table will pop up. You can enter you data directly into this data table or import some existing data for generating your pie chart.

In this tutorial, we will import existing data. Click and select a existing data. We choose a CSV file. You can create your data in any spreadsheet software and save it as CSV file with “Tab” as field delimiter and no text delimited. [Download CSV file]

Click to generate the pie chart.

Step two: Ungroup the pie chart

We need to break the pie chart in pieces in order to apply color and effect to each piece. Select the graph and go to Object -> Ungroup or press [Ctrl+Shift+G] to ungroup it. Now, the text and the graph is ungrouped. We need select the pie chart and apply ungroup one more time to ungroup the pieces of the pie chart.

Now, we can change the color of each piece. Colored graph

Since each piece of pie chart and its remark are joined together, we need to ungroup them in order to applying effect to each piece. Select all pieces and go to Object -> Ungroup.

Step three: Apply “Extrude & Bevel” effect

Select all pieces and go to Effect -> 3D -> Extrude & Bevel. Click More Options to show all settings. Now you can drag the cube to specify the X-Y-Z Axis values or enter the values manually. For this tutorial, 37° for X-axis, 10° for Y-axis and 0° for Z-axis. Enter 20pt for Extrude Depth. Finally, add one more light source by clicking on New Light icon and drag it as shown below.
Extrude bevel setting