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Isometric Basics

Pick a light direction and write it down

Decide where the sun is before you shade anything.

We prototype every scene on paper first. A sheet of triangle-grid paper, a soft pencil and ten minutes are enough to find out whether a composition works. It is far cheaper to erase a pencil line than to rewrite a dozen nested transforms, and the sketch doubles as documentation when someone asks why a block sits where it does.

Your toolkit

  • Triangle-grid paper and a soft pencil
  • A browser with a Layers panel
  • A snippets file of finished scenes
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Written by

Theo Okafor

Theo writes about 3D transforms and rendering performance. He keeps a spreadsheet of every browser bug he has hit with preserve-3d.

All 18 posts by Theo Okafor

1 comment

  1. Pia Jensen

    We used the grid background on our docs site and it looks great with a dark theme too.

    Reply to Pia Jensen

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