What is 'Isometric' pixel art?
Isometric pixel art is a pseudo 3D, but without vanishing points where you can see an equal amount of three sides to an object (well... depending on the object of course, but for the sake of argument, imagine a cube).
Isometric is most typically used in engineering and for assembly instructions and the like. It shows a three dimensional representation of an object (or the constituent parts of it) without there being any confusion about scale or the relative size of parts due to them being more distant in the three-dimensional space the drawing uses.
Traditionally a grid of equilateral triangles is used as a template [A] (where all the angles between lines are 60° from vertical). However, a 60° line in pixel art is not as neat and smooth and ends up looking a little jagged [B] so a slightly different angle is used instead - one that is clean an easy to draw. The actual angle this equates to is not really important but needless to say, its only one or two degrees different. What it does mean though is all the diagonal lines can be drawn in a 2:1 line [C]. (Across two, up one - or across two, down one).
Isometric pixel art(A, B, and C referenced in previous paragraph)
What is it used for?
Isometric pixel art has been around since the very early days of home computer games in games such as "Ant Attack", "Zaxxon", "Cadaver", "Syndicate" and most of the "Sim" sereis by Maxis to name but a few. It has also become highly popular again over the past few years and is well suited to certain genres of game, most notably real-time strategy games (RTS).
It is also possibly one of the easier styles of pixel art to learn though it becomes much harder when you start to try and add tiny pixel level details to objects or start drawing very irregular non-rectangular objects.
Show me some!
The following few pages show examples of isometric pixel art and have been broken down into a few basic categories:
Isometric pixel art representation of our office.
