Sunday, June 2, 2019

Isometric Projection


When making a drawing in Photoshop that employs an isometric projection, it would be nice if I could set the distance between vertical gridlines to be different from the distance between horizontal gridlines. A √3:1 ratio is what I want. It doesn't appear to be possible though.


Instead I put the above image in the top layer at low opacity. I had to forego the snap-to-grid feature. At least Photoshop tells me what angle the line I'm drawing is making with the horizontal. Once I had a 30° line I copied it frequently, sometimes flipping the copy horizontally. Then I moved the copy into place while eyeballing the lines in the top layer. When all of my lines were in place I made the top layer invisible.

When a corridor is in front of another corridor from the perspective of the viewer some trickery is called for. I should have made the walls bounding the corridor in front thicker, perhaps even a full 10' thick. I used dotted lines to show the outline of the corridor in back and I should have used dotted lines in the wall too with inverted colors.

Dotted lines are something I struggle with in Photoshop. The Photoshop line tool models a line as a thin rectangle and I get two sets of dotted lines slightly offset from each other.