How To Create A Gorgeous Isometric Game (In 7 Minutes)

We're going to use Unity. We're going to use Blender. And we're going to use Photoshop. And we're going to create a beautiful isometric Harry Potter level. Specifically, the common room. Everybody wants to live in that Gryffindor common room or Slytherin if you're an evil person. We're going to start with a beautiful simple sketch. This is especially important with 3D. When you're making a 3D level, whether it's isometric or first person, doesn't matter. Just draw out a very simple map or in my case with an isometric level, just a sketch. Now I want to translate this to a blockout in Blender. A blockout is just a simple, it's just walls and floors and ceilings. That's basically what a blockout is. This is just the very abstract shape. So I'm just going to take a cube. I'm going to invert the normals and basically just use loop cuts with controlr just to extend and extrude walls and cut out windows. That's basically it. [Music]

Let's start throwing in details in this scene. Now, I'm not a genius Blender artist, but I do understand how the real world is actually, well, made up of simple shapes. A couch is basically just a bunch of squashed rectangles. A coffee table is basically a cylinder that's squashed. A desk is basically a rectangle with four rectangle legs with a few loop cuts. A broom. It's basically just kind of a cone shape with a long twisty cylinder. A cat, just a bunch of ovals. A present, just a cube with some loop cuts and a little bow shape that's extruded. And my favorite one is a Christmas tree. A Christmas tree is basically just a bunch of different cones sort of stacked on top of each other. Now, one of my favorite tricks when it comes to simplistic stylized Blender art, and frankly, I do this in 2D as well. I like to add little cuts using the knife tool. just little cuts on top of this simple boxy mesh. And those cuts make it look handmade and

also it makes the simplistic artwork look kind of intentional. Okay, that's great. We got some simple shapes here. It's all black and white. Let's go ahead and add some color. I'm going to go into Photoshop and I'm just going to pick some really simplistic colors. A bluish cold sky color. I like that. This fleshy gray wall color. That's good. This brown. This vibrant pop of red. And this greenish color for the trees. I love to smell my colors. If I can't smell my colors, we got a problem. I want you to be able to smell your colors. In my case, I smell winter snow. I smell ooh the ch a chainsaw. I smell popcorn. It smells amazing. So, let's go ahead and just create a bunch of materials in Blender and start assigning these colors. Now, I'll be honest, this is a very kind of uh timeconuming task. You

just need to drag your colors in. Just keep on dragging. Keep on dragging. And now, let's go ahead and bring this into our game development tool, which is Unity. All right. I'm going to bring this blend file. I'm not going to export it as an FBX. I'm not going to do any export. I'm just going to save the blend file and just bring it into Unity. Isn't that cool? And if I want to make any changes to the blend file, I can just open up the blend file, control save, and then switch over to Unity. Oh, it it updated. Whoa. Back and forth. Back and forth. Control save. Unity updated. You don't need to export anything. Stop exporting stuff. The same is true with Photoshop. If I want to make a Photoshop document for our paintings here, I can just control S. It updates in Unity. Go back to Photoshop. Make a change. Ctrl S. updates in Unity. Stop exporting stuff. Don't export things as PGs or FBX's. It's a sin. Do it the right way. Do it the Thomas way. Make it happen. Okay.

I'm going to update all of my materials to be a Tuni Colors Pro 2 shader. This is a paid asset on the asset store. Link is in the description. This is not sponsored by Tuni Colors Pro 2, although I would love that. This is a great asset. I highly recommend it. basically a tune shader strips specular, metallic, and normal maps. Now, you can include those in a tuning colors pro shader if you want, but if you really want to get that classic tune shaded vibe, don't worry about specular, throw it away. Don't worry about normal maps, throw it away. Don't worry about metallic, throw it away, guys. In an age of a flooded market of games on Steam, 90% of those games are typical PBR shading. Ooh, cool normal map. Oh, that's fun. Specular. Yay. Ooh, metallic. Wow, it looks so realistic. Let's stop doing that. Okay, let's stand out. So, the way I'm going to stand out with this isometric scene is get rid of the normal maps, specular, metallic. I just want a nice soft albido. That's all I want. And it's

going to make the scene look kind of like it's made out of velvet. Okay, now let's throw in some lights. Ooh, I'm going to add a little bit of a blue shade at the top right hand corner of our scene. I think I'm going to do this for any scene I create isometric in the future. If you want, it's s sort of a cheat code to make your isometric scene look really beautiful. If you blur your eyes, you kind of can see it's got a bluish to orange gradient. A gradient of color, a shift from one color to the other. Okay, let's go ahead and an let's throw in some Let's throw in a quad with a very simplistic I don't know layer of trees here. I'm just going to draw that in Photoshop. Pop it into Unity. Looks great. Add some snow particles. Very simple default particle system. And then let's go ahead and animate our packages. Let's animate our cat. Let's move some of these chest pieces around. Nice. And let's not forget, move some of these books around. Haunted books. I love it. So cozy for Christmas. And don't forget, hey, that camera needs to be orthographic, not perspective. It's an orthographic camera. That's what makes it look so

cute and precious. I want to pick up those packages and unwrap them with my fingers. That is what orthographic should be. It should feel precious and delicate. But remember, we also want to smell it and we also want to hear it. So, let's throw some sound in there. [Music] [Music]