Isometric Projections in Adobe After Effects (SSR Method)

hello everyone this is Kevin Abrams and in this After Effects tutorial we're going to create real isometric projections strange to say real because isometric projection is very unreal it is very different than like a real 3d thing where you've got foreshortening and whatever but that's a lot of tactical blah blah blah so let's get in After Effects and check this thing out what we're going to be doing is applying what's called the SSR or scale skew rotate method or scale here rotate method in order to take two dimensional things and make them isometric things if you don't know what isometric projections are not sure how you arrived at this video but you know maybe you're curious detected in so it happened then type it into Wikipedia and it'll tell you a lot of technical things about what it is but the short version is if you're looking at a cube and it's in an isometric drawing it should look like a perfect hexagon so a perfect cube will become a perfect hexagon that's our goal with this method how we get there is a lot of math this article's not very long I could have just read it but I won't I'm going to do this tutorial instead so make a new composition and I'm going to show you really quickly how to make an isometric cube I'm going to start by making a rectangle I make the rectangle by double-clicking the rectangle tool now I'm doing this for a few reasons you could just draw your rectangle wherever you want and then move it I prefer to double click up here because this is a fairly precise mathematical thing and I want to know certainly where things are so double clicking up there creates a shape layer and in the shape layer are some contents inside those contents is something called rectangle one where we find a parametric path that can define the size of a rectangle let's do that now by unlinking the sides and making it 200 by 200 so we're going to create a 200 by 200 cube and you cannot see me doing air quotes but I do them because we're doing a projection of a cube so in order to accomplish this we need to scale skew and rotate this thing now we could do that to the lair we could apply an effect but we can actually do all of this inside a shape layer group so rectangle one here is a which means it has transformed controls of that group and look at we got the scale skew and rotation that we're looking for so first let's scale and how much do we scale by well through highly advanced googling other people have already done the math for me so I know I'm going to scale it to 100% , eighty six point six zero two and then there could be many other numbers it's because it's derived from a tangent function which produces a lot of decimal points but this should get you close enough so we're going to scale a hundreds comma eighty six point six oh two squish it a little bit now we're going to skew it we're going to skew it thirty thirty is a magical number out here then we're going to rotate it another thirty and now we've created what looks to be the top of a box that's pretty good so we'll label it accordingly now the other sides of the box we could get by say duplicating this and then just rotating this layer like sixty degrees and then a bunch of other degrees and stuff like that but you can also arrive at this by simply doing the skewing and rotating a little bit differently so I'm going to hit you you call up everything I've changed about this and I'm going to just change the rotation positive 30 to a minus thirty all right and that that Nets me the other wall right there boom nailed it just change the color a little bit so you can sort of keep track of stuff cool now I can duplicate this again and everything's being called top and that seems incorrect but again you could modify the layer attributes you could just modify the layer and you could rotate it you could scale it you could flip it but what we're going to do we're going to go into the contents hit you you again and we are going to say you know what minus thirty rotate it the other way to positive thirty and then position it snapping into place over here and maybe we'll just make that even darker like so and then we've got three sides of cube and I think we started talking about cubes and that this was going to be 200 on each side and it has created a perfect hexagon and even even better than that it's created a hexagon that is a exactly it's going to make this happen for us a hexagon that is exactly 200 radius hexagon so if we drop that down behind maybe make it fully white you can see it is a perfect hexagon we nailed it you can see a little bit of pixel tearing going on right in here it's not going to be enough to really worry about you can make that go away by just sort of adding a stroke to things or just bumping them a minut amount when you finalize things when you're actually putting your design together not a big deal pixel tearing happens to everybody I will say that there is a second two-dimensional way you could make this happen if you wanted to generate one of these things you could do it a different way you could create a square so let's make one of those squares and you know that square is 200 by 200 and what we could do you're probably saying to yourself and then to me you're yelling at me through the computer Evan why don't I just rotate it 45 degrees right I'm with you so far let's rotate at 45 degrees and then squish it down I could just scale this down I go like oh that's right it applies one of them before it does the other one so you couldn't rotate and scale it in this way you would have to add another group to this make sure that rectangle group is inside this other group and then you could squish this group you could definitely do that and through the magic of googling I know but it is going to be scaled to fifty-seven point seven four it's just how magical I am and I wrote it down so you could definitely make things that way if you alter a group make another group put it inside you'll get pretty close as well either one of these ways I personally prefer the SSR method it's a little bit more popular out there and you know I don't have to do group in a group real nesting doll situation because when you get into much more complex designs you're going to find that simplifying is your friend having fewer groups is going to be good and since I said complex things you've eaten your vegetables now it's time to get that tasty tasty dessert and actually make something interesting let's do that let's make a slightly more complex kind of building situation going on let's make a roof and let's make a roof that is a square because I am lame but you know we're doing the thing so we start with a rectangle that is maybe 300 by 300 fun roof you know we could work with Gray's we work with kinks we could work with blues we work with greens and maybe like a teal awesome we're going to work with greens let's call this the roof and on the roof I think there should be maybe like a helipad looking thing so if we've already got a rectangle in there then I should add a circle like a circle of some kind so it's going to make an ellipse that'll be fun so I double click that plox an ellipse into this thing and I can alter all the things about it getting rid of its its fill giving it a stroke and the stroke in here let's give it the cab's give it a very light green lighter lighter lighter like this and you know give it a stroke width maybe 20 give it a size of 200 by 200 that could be fun all right now we got like a dot on the roof I think it needs to be a little bit brighter than that so it stands out so we've got a thing on the roof that's fun maybe we want something animated on it something animated about what's going on on the roof so what can we add we get out another circle to this so if we go in here and we go into this ellipse path maybe let's make this no 25 by 25 kind of situation and we'll position this to be yeah there we go at like minus 100 that's pretty fun it's good spot for it and what do I want to animate it to do well I'll just take this whole group and I'll animate it to just go around in a circle will do that so the rotation will go around in a circle several times maybe two times so this thing is just going we kind of like a loading like a loading bar I guess that's what that might be now we're going to add to the roof we've got as a group because I want to get all of these things into that group I'm going to mess up that group and it's transform here - say it with me eighty six point six oh two and then we're going to skew it 30 and then we're going to rotate it also thirty and we've got this roof and the roof still has the animation still has the circle everything inside of it has been messed up in the way we want so that is now an isometric kind of roof awesome so we've got the roof let's make let's make a wall maybe let's make some walls on this thing and you know how big for the walls be well let's start by making a rectangle and hit you you to mess with the parts of the rectangle this doesn't need a stroke doesn't need a pretty good size maybe 300 by who knows how big and we're going to do the same thing we're going to adding a group putting things in that group and we're going to mess up that group such that it's maybe six point six oh two and again skewing it and again rotating it remember you flip the values around and then everything's good something I like to change though is inside this rectangle I look a gradient fill going on in here so let me just add to this we could add a gradient fill drop that in here and you can mess with the with the fill numerically and you can see everything is kind of working out sort of as you might expect except that everything's been skewed a little bit because we've skewed the group so if I edit the gradient here and we're going to be working with what kind of colors here should we should be brighter at the top than it is that is at the bottom still darker than other things so du du-de awesome that looks fine to me so we've created a wall real super boring wall we did it we can now sort of duplicate this wall and I talked about this a little bit but you can just go layer transform and flip this horizontally to create your other wall if you wish and then just alter that wall a little bit so that it you know so it looks cool go to its contents into its group into that rectangle you could edit the gradients and then in that gradient you could make each of these values just a little bit darker so that they this wall looks like the darker wall that's pretty fun but I think a building is kind of boring unless it has boss a windows windows are probably important what you could do is within this group you could probably add like some circles so if you double click up here drag some circles in here and get this ellipse in here and you see as soon as it goes into that group it starts taking on the attributes of that group but yeah we're putting some tiny tiny windows people like that kind of thing so if we mess with the position here we can get Windows that are wherever we want them we all right that's a fine window who really cares so that looks fine I think that this ellipse here is like a dark window that's working out for me maybe you want if you want some better windows or some more windows you can duplicate stuff you could inside this group add a repeater rubber rubber Peter and you know make a bunch of copies then just end up with a bunch of windows across like that and that is looking all good but you can get as complex and wacky as you want this is really just to show you how you would go about doing that what you end up doing is up to you and I can't wait to see what that is so this has been Evan Abrams hopefully you've enjoyed this tutorial if you got stuck leave me a question in the comments and I will try to get to them when I can try to get to everybody's questions I genuinely want you to get through this tutorial and to apply this stuff so you know let me know if you get stuck if you enjoy this kind of thing though subscribe to this channel we put up new tutorials around here trying to do it about once a week so stay tuned sometimes we take breaks everybody gets busy but if you can't wait check out previous tutorials so we've got a lot of things about motion graphics VFX everything after effects this is where you can get a lot of that if you have suggestions for things you'd like to see in future tutorials let me know hit me up on Twitter a dca rooms get involved on the Facebook page all that stuff and if this really gave you drugs will give you troubles then the project file with all of the stuff that you just saw me make and the intro all of that is available at Evan Ames comm links to that in the cards and that's pretty much it thank you so much for watching there's another reminder to go subscribe you kind of remind people a lot because you know that's the nature of this platform anyway I've been having Abraham's thank you so much for watching and have a great day

Channel: ECAbrams

Views: 119,176

Keywords: adobe after effects, after effects, adobe, after, effects, fx, mograph, motion graphics, motion, graphics, vfx, visual effects, instruction, tutorial, tut, how to, how, to, help, tips, tricks, after effects tutorial, motion graphics tutorial, vfx tutorial, isometric, projection, isometric projection, SSR, scale skew rotate, scale, skew, shear, rotate, scale shear rotate, iso, metric, retro, video game, monument valley, shape layer, shape, layers

Id: UI0cHx8V2Y0

Length: 13min 24sec (804 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 07 2017