Technical Illustrators.org Forum

I added this to James Provost's Advanced Isometrics tutorial, but thought I'd start a thread on the subject as well.

In Kevin Hulsey’s Isometric tutorial he does not mention the 86.602% horizontal scaling? According to him all you need is both left and side views and the top plan view – all to scale.

http://www.khulsey.com/isometric-drawin ... ction.html

So if you were to do a cube in this method, one would assume all three views are the same size; let's say 1"x1"x1".
However, if proceeding with his method the planes do not line up. The left and right sides line up, but the top will not fit.
Perhaps there's a step Hulsey's is not clarifying, because in his example the final projection looks fine.

So either I am missing something or doing something wrong...

I just replied on the post, but here's the answer:

To see why the Scale step is necessary, try making a 1″ isometric cube without that step. If you measure the lines, you'll find that they're not equal.

The Shear and Rotate steps introduce some distortion which the Scale step corrects for.

Thanks James, that is what I noticed as well.
It looks like you have a good handle on creating isometric drawings. Are you called on to provide this type of illustration often?
Is there still room for a technical illustrator to provide this type of drawing if, like others have mentioned, the engineering dept. could create one with some form of CAD? I guess you're not always dealing with a client who has access to those files, or even has an engineering dept?

I think that the more drawing systems you have in your toolbelt, the better prepared you'll be for any drawing situation. Isometric is great for a lot of reasons, but dimetric, trimetric, oblique, 1, 2, 3 point perspective all have their places too.

You're right that most CAD software can output isometrics and even perspective renderings. But CAD operators may not know how to do it, may not have the eye to make an image great, or may be more valuable to the company doing what they do best. That's when we get a call.

Most of my clients though don't have an engineering dept., so they'll come to me with sketches, photos, sample illustrations, whatever they can muster.

Ellipse tutorial by me.

http://s18.postimage.org/ra9yqgv61/untitled2.png