“Great!” you may be saying now. “Now that I’ve created a cube I can jump straight in to the deep end and start on my first masterpiece!” “Wrong”, I say. What happens when you go to create a roof on your house that requires a different shape other than that of a simple cube? The answer is within this section of the chapter. Hopefully it will teach you how to make some more basic shapes for your creations.

First up is the pyramid. You can have normal pyramids or long sections of block with triangle ends. First up we will look at the normal pyramid. Below is an example of how a normal pyramid should look in the isometric style. The sides are straight up and down at a 45° angle. We can change this angle to make the pyramid smaller, as you can see in the second example. If you look closely you should be able to recreate something similar using the same techniques you used to create the cube.

Figure 2.9

Now that you have hopefully got the pyramids out of the way (you can refer back to this section if you need to at any time), we can make some more cool shapes. Now let’s make a cylinder, which are very easy to make. All a cylinder is really made up of are two circles joined by a middle section. Below is an example of a cylinder. To create a circle in the isometric view we first have to make an isometric square, making sure that our circle fits within those boundaries. I have included this process below as well. The shading as you can see, is simply a gradient of colours, going from dark to light. This shading technique gives the illusion of depth as the 2D object is transformed using shadows and highlights.

Figure 3.0

On the subject of round things, one of the most difficult shapes to create in the isometric viewpoint is the sphere. Spheres are basically flat 2D circles; coloured and shaded in such a way as to make them appear 3D. The shading is much like the way I shaded my cylinder. Starting from dark and gradually bringing the lightness of the colour up, giving an illusion of depth. As you can see in the example image below, I have provided the basic outline and then the complete piece. Also there is a zoomed in image of the same complete piece. You can see that I’ve used dithering the make the gradient appear less ugly, making it blend in more. Dithering is the process of taking a colour next to another colour and placing a checker type pattern, or sometimes a random pattern of dots within the other different colour. When zoomed out fully the dots and the different colour blend quite well, creating a colour that is somewhere in the middle of the two, thus mixing them and making the join look smooth.

Figure 3.1