Glassy effect for hexagon in Illustrator

Question

I am making graphics for a 3 meter big stall.

I was thinking about making its background as hexagons. Big hexagons. These will be in a constant pattern, but not joined, that means, a few millimeter gap between each. I tried these but they didn't look very good.

I've seen many tutorials on how to give things a shiny, glassy effect, all were for circles. I've been trying a lot on searching and to do it myself for hexagons, but can't come to a conclusion.

I basically want a shiny patch on each of the hexagons that'll make it look like they are reflecting light, just like this:

Can anyone help me get this effect for a hexagon?

Answer 1

The overall principles are the same for any shape. You want a hot spot near the top, a darker outer edge, and a slight glow near the bottom. How you achieve those is entirely up to you.

With hard corner shapes the effect of the "bubble" can be more difficult because the eye naturally wants to see hard highlight edges as well. As humans, we're just trained to understand that a hard edge object has hard highlights which are more of a bevel than a bubble.

That being posted you can pull off something similar in Illustrator. Here's a quick outline of one possible method:

Then you can easily group and add any shadows you'd like to add.

Answer 2

Here's something I quickly came up with. I'm going to leave you the task of figuring out how to execute it with instructions.

1st obviously you would make a hexagon and you want to apply a radial gradient to your liking. In applying the gloss effect, the liberty I took is that it is different from a circle because it is a more rigid object. The reason gloss works so well on circles is because it mimics the light affect we often see on spheres. That wouldn't be as accurate on hexagons, so I made the gloss effect cover half of the hexagon from point to point.

To create the gloss you first want to use your pen tool and create a shape that completely covers half of the hexagon. Fill this with a white to black gradient from the middle of the hexagon to the outer edge, respectively

Here's the tricky part. You want to select your hexagon and copy it because this is what we will use for our transparency mask. Select the second shape you made and go into the transparency panel You will want to double click the symbol to the right of your hexagon. You are now in transparency mode. Ctrl + Shift + V or paste in place the hexagon you copied. Change the fill color to white. Exit out.

For bonus points. Use the second shape you built with the pen tool as part of the transparency layer as well. You can paste that on top and play around with the gradient to enhance the realism of your gloss effect.