Overhead art creation

#1 Those are typically looking 45-60ish degrees down. You may or may not want to set the camera FOV a little narrower to minimize/remove distortion, depending on your needs.

#2 Louie, I agree with Teck's FOV suggestion. The less of that "wide angle" distortion the better, and in my opinion having none whatsoever is optimal in this situation (since your ground and terrain will have no distortion and it's necessary to keep a consistency between the sprites and the rest of the environment for the sake of realism). For the sprites in the Adventure Kit I just set up a custom camera in Maya that was tilted 45 degrees off the x axis and turned off View>Camera settings>Perspective in the camera window to eliminate that distortion. You could also just select the "side" view camera and rotate it 45 degrees, which would also give you no distortion at all since the side/top/front camera views by default show no perspective.

And when you're building tiles, keep in mind that when you look at a square from a 45-degree angle, it's going to be squashed in one dimension by about 71%. So when building textures for ground tiles, etc. in a graphics program you can keep things looking consistent with that 45 degree viewpoint by scaling them vertically 71%. I'm looking for the formula for that so you can apply it to other angles...

#3 Sorry, someone better at math than me will have to step in on that one. I've totally forgotten my high school geometry. But here is what I have in my notes:

45 degrees - 71% vertically scaled
50 degrees - 77% vertically scaled
55 degrees - 82% vertically scaled
60 degrees - 87% vertically scaled

#4 Thanks a bunch! This is what I need to know

#5 No problem... good luck! :)

#6 In sounds like Louie got his questions answered, but in case anyone else is interested in this sort of thing, I have an example .blend file that I created for creating animated isometric game art (very similar to the Reinerset graphics). You can find the .blend file here, and a forum thread where I talk more about it here.

Basically it's an animated male/female avatar and showing how to render clothes and accessories such that they can be overlayed on top of the base image to have customizable avatars. It's pretty similar to how Ultima Online did their graphics back in the day.

If people are interested in this sort of thing, I might be able to turn this into a resource or tutorial or something. I'm really not an artist -- I'm actually very new to 3d modeling -- but this is just a little of what I've been learning over the past few months as I put coding on hold and learn Blender.

Cheers!

--clint

#7 Wow! Nice work, Clint. I think this would be a useful resource. I've heard from a number of people working on different ways to get characters into the Adventure Kit that may find this helpful, but in a broader application I think any TGB user could learn from it.

#8 Okay, great! I don't own the Adventure Kit, so I haven't seen any of the forum threads about it or I would have posted this information earlier. I'm a little busy at the moment, so I don't think I'm going to spend time working on this resource for at least a few more weeks, but I'm happy to answer questions either on the forums here or via e-mail (hanclinto at gmail dot com) about creating isometric game art, and the math and camera setups to do so. It was a bit of a pain to track this information down on my own, so I'm more than happy to share whatever I've learned if it can save someone else some hassle.

Cheers!

--clint

#9 Well really I think the idea of swappable clothes/weapons/etc. for pre-rendered sprites really applies to TGB as a whole and not just specifically to the Adventure Kit or iso games. Looking forward to the post when you get around to it! :)

#10 And, just to jump in months later and add a little ditty while waiting for renders, if you dolly the virtual camera in your 3d modeller waaaaaaay back (so your model is veeeery small) and then zoom in or change the lensing so that the model is then the right size, you can elliminate parallax.

Parallax means that things farther from the camera look smaller. When rendering a character from the top, it usually makes the character's head bigger than it needs to be. It really becomes evident after you've painstakingly made a great walk cycle for him, only to find out that his feet are impossibly small. No need to panic, just use an old filmmaking trick and scoot your camera very far back and zoom in as much as possible.

I must say that there is a point of diminishing returns on this process--at angles around 45 degrees, the character's shoulders begin to compress near the head and create the illusion of having no neck. So, experimenting is to be expected.

#11 Great post, I was tired of seeing my robot's head so big...

#12 Has anyone tried using a 40 degree angle? I'm toying with the idea, I have it set at 45 degrees right now and am wondering if 40 would scale well.

#13 All the stock Adventure Kit art was created at a 45-degree angle, so you could probably get by with that. Other than the art... the kit itself would have no problems with that.

#14 I have a question related to scaling the ground tiles. If they are supposed to be seamless, don't they break when you scale them in one direction?

@Russell - I think I read somewhere that you use Spiral Graphics' Genetica. I was thinking about using it to create ground tiles. Have you tired it for this? It looked great for creating textures, but I wasn't sure using it for tiles.

Btw, the formula for scaling is sin(angle).
sin(45) = 0.707
sin(50) = 0.766
and so on.

#15 All of the ground tiles for the Adventure Kit (except some of the ocean shore) were created in Genetica Pro, and tweaked in Photoshop a little. It worked out great.