Pstut Isometric Pixel Art

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This post is part of a series called Isometric Pixel Art.

PIXEL ART

Create an Isometric PixelArt Office Building inAdobe Photoshopby René Alejandro Hernández 5 days ago

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Create an Isometric Pixel Art Apartment Building in Adobe Photoshop





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What You'll Be Creating




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In earlier tutorials, we created a pixel art character and gave it a car and places tolive. Now, let's give it a place to work.

An office building is a great piece to do in isometric pixel art because you can addas many floors as you'd like and end up with a pretty large building that took aboutthe same amount of work to do as a house or smaller building.

You'll need to have gone through the Isometric Pixel Art Character and the IsometricPixel Art House tutorial before proceeding.

1. Dimensions

Let's make a floor height and footprint that looks congruent with our character.

Step 1So we'll use the character as a measuring stick, as usual. Here the height I'vechosen is 60 px for one floor.

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I like using multiples of 10 px because moving the elements around using thekeyboard arrows while holding down Shift happens in multiples of 10 px, so thingsfall into place much more quickly and easily.

Step 2Now let's decide on the width for the entrance part of the building. It will have prettywide double doors, so the width for the entrance should allow them in with a bit ofspace around.




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I will also be keeping most of these distances in multiples of 10 px, for the reasonexplained above; it makes things easier later on (and if you're finicky at all, it feelsgood to have your distances measured in round numbers).

The vertical dashes here are simply being used as guides—we might delete themor draw over them later on, so they're not necessary but they usually are helpful.

Step 3




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The entrance area will protrude a bit, so let's give it some depth.

Step 4Add one more line parallel to the entrance. This will be the glass wall. Together withthe entrance they would pretty much make the total width for our building.




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We'll add some seams to the glass wall—that's why those dashes are there.

Step 5Now let's add more depth: the side wall of the building. It'll be shorter than thefront side.




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Step 6Let's finish the footprint. You can move the guide lines to another layer for a while.Here I closed off the area and filled it with white so that the next steps are alittle easier.




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Step 7Now we duplicate the footprint and move it up to the height we had already decidedfor the level.




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Since the surface was filled with color, we have slightly fewer lines to remove.

Step 8We still have to remove the rest of the lines that the walls will block.




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Add a few vertical corner lines and your volume is complete.

2. Details




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Now we'll take care of most of the coloring and details that the first floor will require,which will stay almost the same for the rest of the floors.

Step 1Let's add most of the vertical lines we'll need: one on each corner and some extraones for the glass wall panes' edges.




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Step 2Find colors you like for the different sections of the building. I've chosen to make theentrance look like concrete. The glass walls are about the same color that was setfor windows on the previous house tutorial, and the small area on the edge will be adark brick kind of color.




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You should try playing with the Hue/Saturation/Brightness sliders to find the finalcolors.

Step 3




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Let's set a width for the double doors and push that surface a little bit into thevolume. As usual, you'll want to make the peak corners a lighter shade thanthe walls.




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Step 4Now we set the height for the doors.

Step 5




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And here I've done a slightly dark line right next to a slightly light line to look likesmall grooves—it seems to be common on these kinds of buildings and it makesthe concrete walls not too flat/boring.

We'll also apply these grooves horizontally, later on.




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Step 6We'll make the front doors mostly glass, so fill with the same color as the parallelglass wall. Also, add vertical border lines for the doors, one on the inside cornerand the other one in the center. To find the center you can measure the wholebreak in the concrete with the Select Tool (you'll get the width in the info panel),and then divide that by 2 and you'll know the distance between the inside cornerand where the center corner must go.




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Because the walls around the doors cover part of them, don't expect both of thedoors' glass rectangles to be the same width.

Step 7Let's add a frame around the glass. I've chosen a dark grey, with a slightly cool hue.




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One pixel of grey was enough vertically. For the bottom line I left 3 px height. Also,add the dark lines between the grey and the glass.

Step 8




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Here are the finished doors. I added a small highlight for the bottom part of thegrey/metal areas, a few pixels at about the character's arm height (these are thelocks) and a few darker glass lines, for some sort of glass effect.




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Step 9Now, on to the glass wall. Make the front corner lighter and add an area with adarker shade of the glass color. You can use the Magic Wand Tool to select thewhite top surface and then move that selection down about 10 px so the selectionintersects with the areas of the glass wall you'll want to paint.




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Step 10Finish the lines for all these glass parts. Most corners don't need to be black, andthe seams on the glass should be just slightly darker than the surrounding colors.




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Also, push out the brown wall a bit.

Step 11Adjust the colors of the brown wall, now that it's pushed out.




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The ground floor is almost done.

Step 12Now copy the level and paste it on a new layer (or Alt-Shift-up arrow) and place itright over the ground floor.




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Step 13




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Of course, there won't be doors on the subsequent levels, so start turning the doorsinto a window by joining them into one and adjusting the size. Here it's already a lotshorter, vertically.




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Step 14




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There's no need for the thick bottom edge on the frame, now that it's a window. Getrid of it and make the window narrower. Make sure to keep it centered; if you makeit 12 px shorter on the right, make it 12 px shorter on the left as well.




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Step 15




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Then finish the areas around the window. Fill in the concrete wall color.




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Step 16And make the extra details on the wall. We'll be adding a few more grooves to theconcrete, this time horizontally. Like the previous ones, these are made with oneslightly darker shade of wall color, right next to a slightly lighter one. They will needto be applied to both the top and bottom of this level.




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Step 17




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Now for the glass. We want to keep the seams, but the top and bottom ones areright now in black and we want them with the same color as the rest of the seams.




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Step 18




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Finally we'll do the same with the brown wall, but it's even simpler for this one asthere are no grooves or seams. It's just a continuation of the same colors. Theeasiest way to do this fix is with the Magic Wand Tool; selecting all three colorsand then Alt-nudging 1 px up and also down.




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Step 19




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Let's add a tiny window to this brown wall. It'll be a nice little accent—the windowwill be in a different style. Start with a rectangle. If you do it like this, it looks as if ithas rounded corners and it seems cleaner.




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Step 20




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Fill the rectangle with dark grey (the same color as in the door), and then add ahighlight on the top and a few lines parallel to the top and frontmost edge.




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Step 21




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Give it some depth. Here I also added a highlight on the bottom border.




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Step 22Add a glass color and a dark line between the glass and metal.




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Step 23




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And then just duplicate it so it's also on the ground floor.




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The second floor is complete.

3. Rise

The second floor is in a way like a tile—you could repeat it as many times as youwant, and have a 100-floor building if you wanted.

Step 1But we won't do 100 floors. For this building, five floors feels about right. Anyway, ifthe building is too tall and every floor is the same, it kind of wastes illustration spacewith more of the same.

You can select the second floor layer and press Alt-Shift-up arrow to duplicate iton the fly. Or you could copy/paste, and then just place where it belongs. As Imentioned before, it's possible to move selections 10 pixels in any direction bypressing Shift and the arrow keys.




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Step 2We'll repeat only part of the floor for the top, so that we have a piece of the buildingthat's there simply to provide access to the rooftop terrace. We only need to bring




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up the concrete part.

You may want to do this on a new layer.




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Step 3




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Finish off the volume.

Step 4Add the matching details.




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Step 5Here I added a small section to top off the little concrete box. It looked to me a littleabrupt without it.




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Step 6Fill the top with a light shade of the concrete color and fix any lines that may needfixing. We'll be adding a bit of roof grainy texture, as we did with the apartmentbuilding. Start with a rectangle, centered on the top.





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Step 7Find a color you like for it, and then apply the soft grainy texture and soften theedge.




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Step 8If we wanted, we could imply the door to the terrace is on the side of the cube thatwe can't see, but instead let's add it to the visible side. We'll copy the doors wealready did and adjust them to this new wall.




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Step 9It only needs one door. I kept the little lock visible, and aside from removing one ofthe doors I also made the one I kept a little narrower.




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Step 10The original door faced the lighter side of the building, so you should adjust thecolors to match the new side.




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Step 11Then simply remove the bit of wall below the door.




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Step 12And to finish the volumes for the terrace, let's add a railing—it should be about thecharacter's waist height. Start with the one at the back, and give it the colors of thebrown wall.




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Step 13Then (you might want to put this in a new layer) make the railing go around and onthe front edges.




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Then simply make the borders that come into contact with wall or floor a bit lighterthan black.




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And all volumes are complete.

4. Textures




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Time to finish our building by adding a few simple textures.

Step 1This is the texture we'll add to the brown walls. It won't be black and white, but tocreate it, do these lines of 2 px alternating. You can draw just a few pixels and thenselect and duplicate many times until you cover a large area. You could also do itas a brush by selecting the tile and then going to Edit > Define Pattern.

Step 2Once you have plenty of your texture, you place it in a new layer, covering all brown




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areas. Ideally the black parts of the texture should go over most of the black lines inthe drawing.




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Step 3




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Change the opacity of the texture layer to 20%, or as desired.

Shortcut: you can change layer opacities by pressing numbers on the keyboardwhile the Move Tool is active.

Then on the layers with the brown wall, select all areas of the brown color with theMagic Wand Tool. If you have these areas spread over many layers, you'll find ituseful to set the Magic Wand Tool to Sample All Layers.




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Step 4




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Go back to the layer with the texture and invert the selection (Select > Inverse)and delete.

You'll be left with texture that covers only the walls it's supposed to.




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Step 5




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Now find a color for the rooftop surface.




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Step 6And let's make another simple texture. For this surface we'll do tiles.

Start with a rectangle using a darker shade of the new surface color. Then insidethis darker rectangle do another rectangle but with a shade that's lighter than thesurface. Then duplicate and arrange multiple times.

Step 7Duplicate until you can cover the whole terrace floor with the texture. The contrastshouldn't be too high for this tile.




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Step 8Then repeat the same process as before to cut out the unwanted areas of texture.




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You can now, if you want, merge all your building layers.




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Building Complete!

Congratulations! The office building is done, and now the pixel sky is the limit!




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