Tutorial 103: Isometric Projection
Joe Clay | Dec 29, 2017
This week we take a look at how to make an isometric projection by either faking an isometric camera in After Effects, or using the SSR—Scale, Shear or Skew, and Rotate—method.
We also rig up a cubic object so that we can control it with sliders. You can use this to build anything cubic, like buildings. And I forgot to mention it during the tutorial, but if you duplicate the sides and make them smaller, you can combine them with a repeater to get windows!
If you need to snap to the grid, you can use things like the windows, or a hexagon to snap to. If you have snapping turned on—up top next to Fill and Stroke—you should be able to snap to those features. With snapping off, you can still snap by holding Cmd/Ctrl. Make sure the other two items are checked in that snapping section so you can snap to all sorts of things as you can see in the example below.
Also, a few people noted this is easy to do in C4D. Sure, unless you use it in other ways like this. You'd have to do a lot of setup to do this in C4D for example.
For more information about the math involved, check out this Tuts+ Illustrator tutorial, and be sure to read the comments as well. And you might also find our Tutorial 87: Angular Controls to be helpful when moving things along the isometric grid.
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