In Adobe Illustrator CS, is there a way to rotate a shape while you’re drawing it?
What about:
Object>>Transform>>Rotate
I’m not an Illustrator user, but in Photoshop the 3D transform shortcut is Ctrl + Shift + t
Assuming you mean that you want to rotate it while you draw it, the answer depends on which shape you’re drawing. The star tool, spiral tool, and polygon tool (that is, the “polygon tool”, not to be confused with the rectangle tool, which obviously can draw polygons) all allow you to rotate, move, and modify the shape as you draw it. The oval and rectangle tools do not. Holding the space bar while drawing one of these shapes temporarily stops it from resizing and rotating and allows you to move it around, then when you let go of the space bar, it’s back to resizing etc at the new location. Try it out.
Other semi-obscure shape tool (star/spiral/polygon) behaviors:
[ul]
[li]Hitting the up/down arrows while drawing increases or decreases the number of segments of the spiral, number of sides of a polygon, and number of points of a star.[/li][li]Holding ctrl while dragging the star bigger or smaller holds the radius of the inner points constant, so you can make the star pointier or stubbier easily. Holding alt while dragging a star locks the ratio of the inner and outer radii to a “nice” value (e.g. with a 5-point star it ends up looking like a star that would go on a flag, not too pointy and not too stubby).[/li][li]With the spiral tool, holding ctrl while dragging it larger or smaller affects the tightness of the spiral, and holding alt while dragging it larger and smaller changes the number of winds. These two are hard to get the hang of, but they’re fun to play with once you do.[/li][li]They all have “wacky mode”, which is activated using the backtick/tilde key (upper left, next to the 1 key). Hold this down and as you drag the shapes around, it doesn’t erase the old ones. Spew stars as fast as you can drag! (originally, the key that activated that was ‘w’, for ‘wacky’).[/li][/ul]