The Ink Spot

current process: extrude a rectangle in Illustrator and use Map Art to apply the artwork to the sides of the box. When you map raster art however, the results don't look great

so I'd like to stop ignoring those fancy 3D tools that Photoshop has had for a while and see if I can make something nicer there

Obviously I can use a real modeling program for this, but if I can avoid adding another program to my workflow then I'll be happier

WELZ

@JohnB ahhh, you ever saw Von Glitschkas course on Isometric Illustrations? (on Lynda)

JohnB

nope, I've never used Lynda

WELZ

3:57 PM

he had this process (and turned it into a group of actions: Right, Left, Top) It basically made it very easy to turn any (boring) flat artwork into (visually) 3 dimensional...

JohnB

the workflow here is that the sales people need product mockups of products that don't exist to be used in presentations

I can punch those out with Illustrator very quickly with a 3D extrude but they only look okay at low resolution, zoom in and they look pixely

WELZ

What tool/process do you use to "punch them out"?

JohnB

1 sec, I'm sure I've answered a question with the same process

Ehh sorta, this except a simple box and not a bottle cap

WELZ

If it's just boxes you should really see this:

JohnB

neat!

WELZ

4:11 PM

JohnB

are those actions publicly available? Or does it require a Lynda subscription?

WELZ

This is the same process from that course, you have to make the actions manually, I can give em to you if you'd like

I also have the undo one, that's the real neat feature.

gimme a min

JohnB

what's the undo one?

WELZ

It basically gives you the ability to put it back to a flat image (can make it easier to edit it, and see what it will look like)

nofile.io/f/J3P7TxugsYq/Isometric+Actions.zip

JohnB

@WELZ very cool!

thanks for showing me :)

WELZ

4:23 PM

pleasure!

JohnB

I'm trying to find out where the 86.062 magic number comes from, I'd love to adapt this for non-isometric angles

I bet if I just take one of my previous boxes and work backwards I can do it

WELZ

Idk, I'm not sure if he mentioned it

JohnB

someone asked the same question in a forum post here but no answer

I am sure this is something @joojaa would know :D

JohnB

4:47 PM

Interesting read on copyright infringement by a big guy against a little guy: petapixel.com/2017/11/27/…

WELZ

@JohnB I'm not sure about, it is interesting though. Let me know if you find out.

JohnB

will do!

WELZ

@JohnB, apparently, some people have the incorrect number... its supposed to be 86.602, not 86.062 forums.adobe.com/thread/1593224

I just checked to confirm that my actions were proper. phew

Speaking of the devil, a question bumped by @Community 20min ago... can use this as a solution, <o.o>

JohnB

hah :D post an answer, I'll up vote it!

WELZ

5:13 PM

@JohnB It could work, it isn't very practical IMO, since you need to first manually (and most likely equally) break up your image, and only then could you use this action

joojaa

5:52 PM

@JohnB its the sinus or cosinus of the angle

JohnB

@joojaa bingo!

thank you!

joojaa

@JohnB no prob

The trick is to know who or what knows not knowing :)

JohnB

WELZ

@joojaa which angle?

1 hour later…

joojaa

7:03 PM

@WELZ 30 degrees

1 hour later…

joojaa

8:11 PM

@JohnB also incidenttally (reading transcript) i have described how to do this for arbitrary transforms

JohnB

When I get some time I'm going to tinker with it and try a different angle

something that features one side prominently rather than isometric

joojaa

A: Trimetric cube drawing in illustrator

In trimetric projection each axis has a different scale. The first thing to do is getting the scale correct (see here). Since you have tool for this (as per a now deleted question), I'm not going into this subject. I'm just going to assume you know the shape of the unit square you want to generat...