Rendering Isometric Assets & Pixelating Renders [In Blender]

[Music] hey everyone i've always been really into isometric and top-down video game art some of my all-time favorite games have been isometric or top-down so i thought it might be helpful to share how to set up your scene to render in these styles as well as some tricks for making your models appear like pixel art while initially looking into it i found that video game camera perspectives fall into various categories that are defined by the exact perspective used but for our current purposes we're just going to refer to them as isometric and top down one of the very first things that i ever tried to do in blender was figuring out how to set up my scene to render isometric assets and the first thing that you want to decide is what render engine to use since it dictates how you set up your lighting and materials blender comes with several the two most commonly used are cycles and ev cycles is a physically based path tracing engine so it mimics real lighting and looks photorealistic you can adjust your samples and noise in this menu fewer samples will render faster but be less accurate although with these new d-noise options you can get away with pretty low sample counts evie however is a real-time engine you can still get really good visuals from eevee it's generally not quite as photorealistic as cycles but significantly faster and eevee has a bunch of settings you can mess around with as well once that's decided now it's just simply setting up your camera so select our camera either in the 3d viewport or the outliner and then enter the active camera view by hitting numpad 0 while hovering the mouse over the 3d viewport in isometric games no matter the object's distance from the camera it appears the same size and you can see by our grid currently that we have perspective so head into the object data properties tab over here which should now look like a green camera since we're selected on the camera object and change the lens type to orthographic now we need to position our camera while over the 3d viewport hit n to bring up the side menu adjust your camera's z rotation to 45 and for a perfect isometric view change the x rotation to 54.736 it sounds like a weird number but now each visible face is the same shape and size to center our scene we can now either adjust the location of our camera in the scene the transform menu or adjust the x and y shift in the object data properties menu we can also adjust how much of our scene the camera picks up by changing the scale in this menu if you zoom out really far you'll start to see a falloff on what the camera picks up and that can be adjusted with the clip settings we don't currently need to be this far out so let's get zoomed back in and address this gray border down here this is where the camera is clipping through the z-axis and it's easy to fix we can just move it up on the z-axis if you want to keep your objects aligned with blender's grid you can enable snapping to increment here but it's very likely that you'll want to turn this off as you model your objects and then just using really simple shapes and materials you can make some pretty cool looking stuff here's some random stuff that i've made and rendered in isometric view isometric is pretty cool but what if you want to make your scene look top down like stardew valley or an old pokemon game it's pretty simple select your camera change the z rotation to zero and then the x rotation is pretty much up to you 45 degrees seems pretty standard but you can use 30 60 or really anything else i tried quickly replicating some buildings using screenshots and it looks like stardew valley is probably 45 degrees the buildings in pallet town looked like they were 40 degrees but i think the aspect ratio of the image i found was off because in another picture it looked more like 45 degrees again so if you're building off of reference make sure to get a couple pictures preferably from the source game and not a random google image once you've got your model you can go up here and render it as is or there's a bunch of very cool options that you can use during the render process say you want your image to have outlines you can go into the render properties tab and enable freestyle and you can adjust the thickness of your freestyle lines here there's also a bunch more freestyle options in the view layers properties tab [Music] if you want the background of your image to be transparent open up this film drop down and check transparent if you want to adjust the resolution of your image before you render it you can do so in the output properties tab which looks like a printer so if you want your image to look like pixel art you can turn down the resolution and the render will be pixelated which is super cool and also makes tiny file sizes which is really nice a lot of older sprite based games are rendered out 3d models so if you want to replicate that this is a good way to do it and you can also use these models in a ton of different ways use them as is in 3d engines create sprites or render them out and use the renders as pixel art i've even seen people set up simple scenes render them out and then use them as shape and perspective guides to draw over there's really no limit to what you can do thank you for watching i hope you enjoyed please like subscribe and leave us a comment on what you'd like to see us make if you'd like to help the channel grow share a video we also have a patreon thank you again stay safe i love you all okay goodbye [Music] you

Channel: The Observatory

Views: 18,634

Keywords: Isometric, Top Down, Pixel Art, Blender, Isometric Camera, Top Down Camera, Isometric Pixel Art, Tutorial, 3D, View, Camera, Render, Scene

Id: faz9tPkM0Ak

Length: 5min 22sec (322 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 22 2022