Isometric Drawing in Affinity Designer

1. Class Introduction: In affinity designer, there's a great feature where you can create designs using an isometric grid. This special grid allows you to easily make beautiful three D objects like this. I love using the isometric grid, but it can be a little tricky at first. Today, I'm excited to tell you all about my brand new course, where we'll learn how to make isometric drawings in affinity designer. Like all of my courses, we're going to start from the very beginning. I'll teach you all about setting up the grid and my best tips and tricks for working with it. Once we have all that figured out, we'll start to create simple isometric objects. Then we'll jump into creating an entire scene using the grid as our guide. I love to keep my courses as practical as possible. Once we understand how to make simple objects, we'll build on those skills by creating a series of projects together. As we create these projects, I'll show you how to plan out your ideas and choose the right colors for your design. Of course, I'll give you lots of tips for working with the isometric grid all along the way. Working with the isometric grid is a really fun way to design. If you've never worked like this before, I think you'll really enjoy it. But before we dive into affinity, I want to mention that this course comes with a few example files that we'll be using throughout the course. I encourage you to download and use them because practicing what you learn is the best way to retain all of the new skills that you'll be learning. You can download those files in the next lesson, and then you're ready to begin your journey to becoming an isometric drawing master. Let's get started. 2. Download the Class Files: Before you begin this class, I recommend you download the exercise files. These files will be necessary for you to follow along with the tutorials to download the files, come to the Project and Resources tab. Then click on the download link. The files will then be downloaded to your computer and you'll be totally prepared to follow along with the rest of the class. 3. Isometric Fundamentals: For the first chapter of the course, we're going to learn the fundamentals of isometric design. We'll do this by learning how to set up our document and we'll learn a few shortcuts to make this process easier. Let's get started. 4. Document Setup: In this video, I'll show you how to set up your document for isometric designs. To start, we first need a blank new document. I'll go to the top to file, and then I'll press new. This document can be whatever size you'd like for your project. But for this, I'm going to go with 1920 by 1920 pixels. I'll press Create. Next, we'll need to add a new panel. I'll go up to the top to window, and then I'll go down to isometric. This isometric panel is very important for this course. We'll be using it in every single video. I want this to be very easily accessible. I'm going to click and drag on the word isometric to move this panel. Then I'm going to drag it over here to the left until it overlaps with the tools. You can see this blue box appear. When you see that, you can release and now that grid is docked over on the left side. Now, this takes up quite a bit of our screen. If you don't like that, you can actually click and drag to dock it over here next to the color panel. I think that's another great place for it. But for this course, since we'll be using it so much, I'm going to leave mine right over here. The next step is to modify the grid settings. Click right here on Modify grid. Now, I've been using an isometric grid in preparation for the course. My settings might look a little different from yours. Let me just reset here. You're probably an automatic mode. Make sure to turn on show grid. You can see by default that our automatic grid is pretty straight up and down. But if you'd like to get an isometric grid, you can go over two advanced and then change the grid type to isometric. This isometric preset is great. It gives us a really good starting point. You can see that there are a lot of different settings that you can change to adjust the angles of the grid. But these are a little complicated to use. The only thing that I'll change for right now is I'll go to where it says divisions, and I'm going to press eight and then enter on my keyboard. What I just did is I added some division lines to the grid. These subdivision lines are a helpful guide as we zoom into our document. You can see they multiply the more we zoom in. One last thing that I want to show you is that you can change the way your grid looks by changing the colors right down here. If you click right where this color is, you can see that you can change it to any color of the color wheel, which could be important depending on your colors that you're using in your design. If you're going with a black and white theme, then these gray lines might blend in and not work for you. I think this is nice to know that it's here, and you can also change the opacities of these lines. You can make the lines a lot softer or way darker. I like to leave my main grid lines as the darker lines because these lines don't move no matter how much you zoom in, and the subdivision lines are just a helpful little guide. I don't want it getting in the way, I like to keep those a lighter color. Now that we're done, I'll just press close. You can go back to adjust this grid at any time by clicking on grid settings. Our document is all ready to go now. In the next video, we'll start making some shapes while using this grid. 5. Isometric Panel: Let's use the isometric panel to make a perfect cube. The isometric panel allows us to quickly modify our shapes to fit the perspective that we want. To start using the isometric panel, first, I'm going to click right here on the rectangle tool, and then I'll click and drag out a rectangle while holding shift. I'll just change the color here. Then I'll grab the move tool. I'm going to duplicate this twice. My favorite shortcut for duplicating is just to hold down command or control on your keyboard, and then you can click and drag to duplicate your shape. I'll just do that twice. I'm just going to make these a different color. Now that we have our squares, we can use the panel to turn these shapes into a perfect cube. First, I'm just going to have one of my squares selected. Then if your panel looks like this, just click on enable planes, and it should look like this. Once you have that set, make sure your current plane is set to top and then go down to where it says fits a plane. You can see that this has automatically changed our straight up and down square into the top of a cube. We can do this with the rest of the squares. I'll just select one. I'll change the current plane. I'll just change this one to front, and then I'll click on Fit to plane. Now this looks like the front of the cube. I can line it up right over here. And we can do this with our last piece as well. I'll go to the side plane, fit to plane. Then I'll click right here to add it to our cube. To make this easier to fit together, make sure you have snapping turned on. If it's still not snapping perfectly in the corners, that happens sometimes, don't worry. We have a whole video dedicated to snapping later on in this chapter. We have our first cube. Let me just move this to the side. Another way that we can use the isometric panel is actually to use Edit in Plan. You can activate Edit in plain by clicking right here. Then you can grab a shape tool and you can see that as I drag out while holding shift, We're automatically editing in whichever plane we have selected. I can do this with the rest of them. We could do it with the front plane. I'm just going to press Escape. That way that layer isn't selected as I'm dragging, and then I'll hold shift and drag outward like that. I'll just change the color. Last one, let's go to the top. We're editing and plane. Then I can go ahead and press shift and click and drag to finish our cube. That was pretty easy, wasn't it? I love editing and playing. I also love using fit to play. They both have different reasons why you would want to use either one of those methods. Now, the last thing I want to show you in this video are these other options. We only used the first two. I'm going to go to our shapes, and I'm going to select the call out ellipse. I'm just going to change the plane to front and edit in plane, and then I'll click and drag out a little ellipse like that. These last ones are all about changing the orientation of your shapes. You can flip horizontal in the plane like this. You can flip vertical. You can also rotate counter clockwiys, and clockwise. Now, as I'm clicking through these, you might be wondering, don't we already have those options up here? We have a flip horizontal and a flip vertical right here, and we even have these rotation ones. Why would we have them here too? Well, I was wondering the same thing, so I experimented a little and I noticed that there's actually a difference. If you flip horizontal in plane, you can see that our shape stays in this orientation. But if I click the option up here in the menu, you can see it actually switches planes. There are different reasons why you would want to use each one of these options. It's nice to have all of them available to you. All right. Now you know what every single button in the isometric panel does. In the next video, we're going to do a quick review of some useful shortcuts that we'll use throughout this course. 6. Shortcuts: This video, we'll do a review of shortcuts. I have an exercise file for this video. Go ahead and pull it up so that you can practice these shortcuts along with me. Before we practice, let's just make sure we have the same grid settings. I'm not sure how affinity will open this file on your computer. Just go to grid settings, and then make sure you're in advanced mode. Isometric with eight divisions, and make sure show grid is checked on. The first shortcut that I want to show you is one that we already did, and that's duplication. If you hold down command or control and then click and drag on an object, you'll be able to duplicate it. Just make sure that you keep holding down command or control and then release your mouse to place the object. If you lift up on command or Control first, you'll just move the object, which is not what we want to do. It's a mistake that I make all the time. I just wanted to mention this to you, hold down Command or Control, click and drag, then lift up on your mouse cursor, and then you can lift up on command or Control. Hopefully, that makes sense. Go ahead and practice it to see what I mean. Another shortcut that we'll use quite a bit is moving objects in line with the grid. To do this, you'll just hold shift while clicking and dragging to move the object. You can see we're moving the object that way. You could also do it this way, in line with the grid, all while holding shift. Now, you can actually combine these shortcuts to duplicate an object and move it in line with the grid. To do that, just hold down command or control and shift at the same time, and then you'll duplicate the object while moving it in line with the grid. We'll use this one quite a bit throughout the course. It's a good one to have memorized. I'll just delete this square to show you the next one. Command or control and shift are very useful for moving objects and duplicating them, but these shortcuts are also really helpful for resizing objects. We already know that if you hold down shift, you'll be able to resize your object and keep it perfectly proportional. But if you combine that with command or and shift, you'll be able to resize the object, keep it proportional, and it resizes from its center point. This is very useful if you like the placement of your object, but you just want it to be a little bit bigger or smaller. Just to show you a use case for this. You might want the center of this flower to be a little bit bigger. I'll double click to select that center of the flower. Then I'll hold command or control and shift, and we can resize it from the center point. While we're working with this flower, notice that these two layers are in a group together. If you select the group and resize them, you actually don't need to hold shift. It'll already resize perfectly proportionally. But if you're working on a single layer like the center of the flower, you do need to hold shift. This can take a little getting used to, I just wanted to mention that. These next two shortcuts are shortcuts that we'll use quite a bit to adjust the view of our workspace. First, if you want to resize your Canvas, so it fills the screen again, you just need to press command or control zero. That one's pretty easy. The other one is command or Control, and then you need to hit the quotation marks. Command or Control quotation mark. This will hide the grid. This is really nice so that you can accurately see your design and even more accurately see your colors. I've noticed that my colors tend to look a little bit more dull and gray under the gray lines. But as soon as I remove them, you can see just how bright they are. I really like doing this throughout my work so that I can see this better. The last shortcut that I want to review is pressing command or Control S to save your document. We'll work with some very large documents with a lot of layers. It's really important to save your work as you go just so the program doesn't crash or make you lose your work. Now, as I worked on this course, the program never crashed on me, which was really good, but it can happen. Please save as you go. Those are the main shortcuts that we'll use throughout this course. I may sprinkle in a few more shortcuts here and there, but those are the most common and important ones. In the next video, we're going to take a closer look at how we can make snapping work better for us in this course. 7. Snapping: This video, I'll show you the snapping settings that we'll use for this course. Snapping is Affinity's way of helping us to line up objects in relation to other objects or to the grid lines, or to the document itself. For this course, I'll show you my preferred settings and we'll turn it into a preset so that you can quickly turn those settings on anytime you want to work isometrically. First, make sure you have snapping turned on. Then you can click on this little arrow right here to open up its settings. The first setting we can change is screen tolerance, which will adjust how weak or strong the snapping is. I really like the default of eight. It helps us to freely move our objects while still snapping nicely. Next, we can change the candidates. Snapping candidates are the other layers. The way this works is that our current object will snap to the last six objects that we had selected. To see this better, I'm going to check on show snapping candidates. You can see the snapping candidates are the shapes that are highlighted in magenta like this. If I move one of these shapes, you can see that we're able to snap to the center of this highlighted object very easily. But you can't do that with the tree because it's not a snapping candidate. If you want to add an object as a snapping candidate, you can select it, or you can just hover over it. If it helps you, you can leave show snapping candidates checked on to have this magenta outline. But I'm going to turn mine off because I find those magenta lines a little distracting. Even though I've turned that off, if you hover over an object to turn it into a snapping candidate, it will still momentarily light up in magenta, which is still a nice feature. The next thing we can change is only snap to visible objects, which I like to have checked on. This means that if we ever turn off one of our layers, our object won't be able to snap to it anymore. Next, we have force pixel alignment, which is fine to have checked on. This will just help things to align better on your screen. Next down here, we have this grouping of options. We definitely want snap to grid checked on. We went to all the trouble of making the grid, so it would be a shame if our object couldn't snap to those lines. Next we have Snap to baseline grid. The baseline grid is actually more useful in affinity publisher, and we won't be using it in this course, so I'll turn that off. Next we have Snap to guides. This also is not necessary because we will not be making any manual guides. I'll turn that off. Snap to spread is basically just snapping to the document itself. If you ever want an object to hit the very edge, you can see that yellow line going up and down is showing us that's lined up. Then you'll definitely want to have that checked on. And if you ever want to center your design, make sure you have include spread midpoints. Last, Snap to margin is not necessary for this course because we will not be working with margins. Let's jump down to the last section. These options can be a little confusing at first, so I definitely want to explain what's going on. First, we have snap to object bounding boxes, which means that you'll snap to the blue bounding box that surrounds your object. You can see we have this blue bounding box highlighted right here, and with the star, you can see the bounding box actually goes outside of the shape a little bit. Even though it's going outside of the shape, if we line up these objects, you can see that it snaps, it's snapping right now to the outside edge of this shape. I like to have this option checked on. Next, we have snap to shape key points, which is useful because it helps us to snap to the corners of objects. If I grab the pen tool, you can see that we're able to snap to the outside corners of this star. That can be very useful if you're going to draw a shape that's connected to the star. We'll keep snap to shape keypoints turned on. Snap to object geometry is also really helpful. Again, when working with the pen tool, we'll be able to line up to the very edge of the shape, not just the corners. So you can see on this rounded curve here, we have a yellow line being highlighted, which allows us to begin drawing our curve directly on the edge of the shape. I really like this feature so I'll leave it turned on. Last, we have Snap to Pixel selection bounds. This isn't necessary for this course because we won't be making any selections, I'll turn that off. Now that you have a basic understanding of these settings and you change them, so they match mine. We can go ahead and turn this into a preset. Go up to where it says preset and then click on the Hamburger menu right here. Then you can click Create Preset. I'm going to name this isometric course. Then I'll press k. Now if I go back into these settings, you can see the preset we have selected is isometric course. This preset will automatically be here whenever you open a new document. You don't need to worry about these settings for the rest of the course. It's all set. I know that this first chapter was a lot of setup, and now you're totally ready to get creative. In the next chapter, we'll start getting creative by building some objects and eventually building an entire room. 8. Isometric Skills You Need: That we learned how to set up our document. In this chapter, we're going to take all of those skills and create a room scene. This is going to be a lot of fun, so let's get started. 9. Understanding Lighting - Part 1: This video, we'll take a closer look at lighting. Times adding shadows and highlights to our work can be a frustrating process. But in isometric artwork, it's actually very easy because we have three planes that are very distinct from each other. We have our top plane, the side plane, and the front plane, and each one of these planes actually gets a separate level of light. Let's take a closer look at this exercise file. In each one of these squares, we have a cube and a light source. Our job is to decide how to adjust these colors lighter or darker, depending on where the lighting is coming from. Let's start with this sion cube. The light source is over on the left, and it streams down in this direction. Because of that, I think that this side should be the lightest side. I'll double click on it to select it. We need to double click because these are in groups. Then I'm just going to make this a lighter color. Then we can decide which side should be the darkest side, which I think is this one. This is the farthest away from the light, and I think this side would be blocking this side from getting any light. I'll click on this one and I'll make this one darker. And for the top side, I think we'll leave that alone. It should be getting a mid level of light since some of the light will be spilling over onto it. But it's not as direct of light as the side. That's the exercise. Look at the light source, then make the closest side lighter and the farthest side darker. You can go ahead and pause the video now so that you can try these other two by yourself. Let's see how you did for the orange cube. This is actually just the opposite of the cyan cube. The light is coming from the top right, so this side should be the lightest. And this side should be the darkest. For the pink cube, you can see that the light is shining right on this side. This is a little tricky, but it is over on this side a little bit. I think this would be the darkest side. Some light would probably spill over here. No worries if you got that one wrong. I don't know if I placed this very well. But now that we're done with that, you can see all of our cubes have very distinct lighting on each of their planes. That was the first exercise and I have one more for this video. We're going to add gradients to these cubes to make them look more realistic. Let's start with the cyan cube, and I'm just going to select the top rectangle so that we can apply a gradient to it. Then I'll select the gradient tool and I'll make sure we're working in the top plane edit and plane. I'm just going to click starting closest to our lightest side, and I'm going to move back like that. We get light to dark. You can see that this gradient actually looks a little different from normal because it has four color stops. This is because I edited in plane when I placed this gradient, which means that it's set up at the exact angle of our grid. I'll press command or control quotation marks so that you can see the grid, and you can see how well this lines up with our grid. If you want to adjust the gradient, you can use the color stops that are on the more solid line and you can move those around. But if you want to adjust the angle, you can use these dotted ones to really change the angle here. But because I edited in plane, we don't need to worry about that. I'll press command or control quotation marks one more time to get rid of the grid. Then we can go ahead and continue this for the other sides. Let's go to this side here, I'll change it to the side plane. Since this is the darkest side, I think I'll start my gradient over here and get darker as we go in that direction. I'm stretching it just a little more to spread out the gradient and make it more subtle. Feel free to place these however you'd like. Now we can go ahead and move on to the last side. Since this is the lighter side, I think I'll start my gradient here and go darker that way. But this time, I actually forgot to change the plane to the front side. But that's okay. I can quickly just adjust these nodes, and now it's in the proper orientation there. I'll just get the move tool out so we can see what this looks like. You can see that with those added gradients, we just have a little bit more realism to our cube. These look a bit more flat now. With that done, we can go ahead and add gradients to these other cubes to make them look more realistic as well. Starting with this one, I'll select the front plane, I'll get the gradient to out. Then I'll click and drag like that. I'll do the back one next. I'll change it to the side plane. I'll click and drag like that. Then I'll do the top piece. I'll change it to the top plane. I'll click and drag out like that. Last one. L et's start with the top plane because we already have that selected. I'll click and drag outward like this. Sometimes this happens where this color stop becomes very saturated. I think I'll tone that down just a little bit. I'll do the darkest side next. Here we go. The last side. All right, and we're done with the gradients. Great job. In the next video, we'll do a challenge where we test the lighting skills that we just learned. 10. Understanding Lighting - Part 2: Let's do a lighting challenge. I have one final lighting challenge for you, and this is really going to push our lighting and our isometric skills. Here I have a simple grid setup with three color swatches. Our grid is just the same as we've been working with. Advanced, isometric, eight divisions. These three colors are what we're going to use as we design a green three D chair together. This will really help us to practice working with shapes and choosing the lighting as we go. To start, I'm going to grab the rectangle tool, and then I'll make sure we're in edit and plane for the top plane. Let's start by making the seat of the chair. I'm going to line up my cursor here with one of the corners. Then I'll hold shift and I'll drag out like that. Now we have the seat of our chair all lined up with the grid. This looks great to make this three D. I'm going to add a side here and a side here. We need to change our plane to do that. I'll change to the side plane to start. Press Escape. Then I can line it right up perfectly. I think I'll bring it down just one square like that, one big square, and I'll do the same for the other side. I'll press escape. I'll line it up and then I can drag it so that it matches up on every corner. Now, we need to decide how we're going to light this chair. Usually, lighting comes from above. To keep things simple, I'm going to make this seat, this top part, the lightest color. I'll sample that and then I'll apply it. Then we can go ahead and choose which side should be the medium color. I think I'll go with this side. I'll choose this middle color and apply it. Then this last side can be the darkest color. I think that's already applied. Yeah. Next, we can go ahead and make the legs of our chair. Since I'm already in the front plane, we can go ahead and start there. I'll start down here and bring it up like this. We have one big square of width, and then it goes down one, two, three, four. You can make yours a different size if you want. I just wanted to point out what I was doing. Now let's make this side of the chair leg. I'll go to the side plane. I'll press escape. I'll line it up on the corner, and then I'll drag it up like that. Now we're working in a different plane. We're working in this plane. It needs to be the same color as this part of the chair. All right. I'm going to press shift and select both of these layers. Then using the move tool, I'm going to hold down command or control and shift to duplicate this chair leg over I'll do the same thing one more time, holding shift to select both of these layers, then command or control and shift to move the chair leg over. Even though this duplicated the chair leg pretty nice, you can see that we have some areas that are overlapping where they shouldn't be. I'm going to select this layer and bring it to the top. Then I'll select this layer and bring it to the top. We can move the chair seat up just to keep everything together. Okay, look at that. We have a cute little stool. To finish the chair, we just need to add a back to it. To start, I'm going to go to the front plane, and I'm just going to build this leg up to create that back. I'll grab the rectangle tool, I'll press escape. Then I'll line it up with this corner here and drag it upward. I want this to be the same width as the leg. That looks good, and the same color. Everything in that front plane should all be the same color. This looks really good. Let's make the back of the chair next. It looks like we'll have to use the side plane to do that. I'll press escape, and I'll start right in this corner right here. I'll line it up with this other edge. Then I'll line it up with the other corner. You can see this is meeting here. Here, and here, that's what I was really looking for. We need to match the color to the plane, so it needs to be this front color right here. Last, we just have this top piece right here. I'll go to the top plane, and I'll click and drag like that, and I'll change it to the lightest color to match. We've made our cute little chair. I'm going to press command or control quotation mark to get rid of our grid. But you can see what that looks like. I think that's so cute. You can see how simple that process was since we already had the three colors picked out. Every plane got its own color. You can see the top plane, both got the lightest color, the side plane, got the middle color, and the front plane got the darkest color. That was consistent throughout the entire design, making it very simple to know which color goes where. In the last video, we practiced adding gradients, and I think this would be a good time to continue that practice. How do we add gradients when we have so many pieces? Well, one strategy I like to do is actually to add pieces together to make them all one big piece. That way we just need to apply a gradient to one big side. I'm going to grab the move tool. Then I'm going to select all of the dark pieces that are connected over here. I'll do that by holding shift and clicking on each piece. The layers weren't next to each other, so it would have been hard to pick them all out. But by holding shift and clicking right in the document, we got those all selected. Now I'll use the ad operation to add them together. This is all one piece now and I'm going to move it to the top so that it doesn't overlap strangely with the other pieces. Then I'm just going to do the same with these pieces since they're not connected, I'll hold shift to select all of them. Then I'll add them together. Everything else is separated from other pieces of the same color. I'll just leave that alone. Now we can go ahead and add gradients to all of these pieces. I'll get the gradient tool. We'll edit in plane for the top plane, and we'll start with the top of the chair right here. I'll select its layer, and then I'll click and drag back like this. For this outer color stop. It looks a little too saturated for me, so I'm just going to mute this down a little bit. There we go. The reason I decided to make it go darker toward the back of the seat rest is because I thought that the light would be shining down and this seat rest might cast a little bit of a shadow. That's why I decided to do it that way. Let's add a gradient to this other top piece. This would probably be fully exposed to the light. But just to keep it consistent, I'll add a gradient that gradually gets darker toward the back. I think that looks pretty good. I'm stretching it a little more so the gradient becomes more subtle. We can continue this. Let's do the back of the seat in the side plane. I'll start from the top and drag it down to make it darker. Then I'll do this connected piece that we created earlier. I'll start up here and drag it down. We can't forget about this piece back here. I'll do a similar gradient starting high and ending low. And one last one. We have this big piece here. I'm going to change the plane to the front plane. Then I'll start high and end low. I'll do the same for this little piece over here. Start high end low. I'll press V for the move tool and then escape. Now we can see the whole chair with its beautiful gradients. Can you believe that you just made that? Great job. In the next video, we'll use the node tool to adjust shapes. 11. The Node Tool: Use the no tool to customize our shapes. We have a couple of shapes here and I'm going to start with this triangle. I want to customize this triangle to turn it into a snowy mountain range. To start, I'll just select the triangle. Then up in the context toolbar, I'm going to convert it to curves. Now we can work with each of its individual nodes to adjust them and turn them into a mountain range. To start, I'm just going to select the sharp node right up here, in the context toolbar, I'll change this to a smooth node. This is a good start. But I want to have three peaks to this mountain using only the shape. To do that, I'm first going to add a node to either side of this first point up here. These points will anchor that first peak so that it doesn't move. Then I'm going to click in between right here in between these two nodes, and then I'll raise it up to create another peak. I'll do the same on the other side. Now that we have all of the nodes we need. We just need to adjust them to adjust nodes. I actually like to have a few settings in the context toolbar turned on. Let's go up and make sure that we have the same settings up here. Under the snapping settings, I like to have a line two nodes of selected curves turned on. I also like to have a Snap to geometry of selected curves. Last, I like to have perform construction snapping. Once you turn all of those settings on, Affinity will always remember those settings whenever you open the program. You don't need to worry about them anymore. I just wanted to make sure we have the same settings so that this goes nice and smoothly for you. With that set, we can go ahead and adjust these nodes, and I'll use a few shortcuts for this. First, I'm going to select this node, and I want to make sure that we're working in the front plane. That way, we can follow this line while holding shift to stretch this out. I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but you can see as you switch planes that the lines change. Right now, this mountain lines up perfectly with the bottom. But if I change it to the side plane, you can see that this is more of the base line here. We don't have a line going this way anymore. When you go to the top plane, it changes again. Now this time, this line right here matches up nicely, and we have that side line. I just quickly wanted to mention that so that this makes more sense. The lines do change as you change planes, and that's why your shapes appear a little different on each plane. I think I'm going to stick to the top plane for this since we have this nice line right here, I'm just going to continue to move these nodes. Now, if you want to change multiple nodes at once, you can click and drag to select all of the nodes, and then you can move them. But if you want to select multiple nodes that aren't right next to each other like that, you can hold shift, and then you can select multiple nodes like that. Then you can just move those nodes. I think I'm just going to adjust this node and I'm going to move its handles a little bit, just to smooth out that peak. I I like that shape. To finish off this mountain, I want to make it three D. To do this, I'm going to show you a super easy technique that you can use to turn any flat object into a simplified three D shape. To do this technique, first, I'm going to grab the move. I'll select our mountain. Then I'm going to hold down command or control, and I'm going to click and drag to move this forward. But I'll also hold shift so it stays and in line with the isometric plane. The next step is selecting this lower duplicate copy, I'm going to make this a darker color. Our last step is to connect these two pieces so that they look like they're one shape. These areas where there's a gap between the two pieces. Make this look like they're two distinct shapes. I'm going to use the pen tool and I'm going to connect the two shapes. I'm going to place my pen tool so that it aligns with the outside edge of the shape. You can see this yellow line are. I'll click to lay down a point. I'll do the same for this side. Looking for that yellow line. Then I'll click to add that line. I don't want to connect it straight over here or we'll accidentally connect this whole area. I'm actually going to dip down like that. Then I'll just connect these two peaks. Then I'll bring it around like this, and I'm going to connect these two corners together. Finally, we can close out our shape. I know this shape looks a little strange right now, but we're going to fix that. Our next step is to select this darker color, and then we'll apply it to that pen path. I'm going to move this layer so that it's beneath our top layer. Now you can see that this looks like one connected piece. These lines are a little bit bumpy though. I'm going to select this pen path, and then I'll press A to get out the node tool. I'll just zoom in here. I want to make sure that these points align nicely with the shape, but that there's no bumps. I needed to move that one forward a little bit because when it was back, you can see this bump right here, making this look a little bit strange. I want this to look as flat and nice as possible. I think that looks pretty good, and I'll do the same over here, maybe bringing it out a little bit. That looks very smooth and connected. I'll just do the same over here. You can see this big bump right here looks a little strange. I'm going to select this node and move it over, maybe even more. Then I'll select this node. I actually think that one looks good. Our last one was just a nice straight line. I think that I spoke too soon. I thought it was fine, but it's not actually connected. There we go. Now that all of those points are aligned, I'm going to hold shift to select this odd shape and our back piece. Then I'll use the add operation to combine them into one piece. I like to do that just so we have less layers. It just simplifies things. Now you can see we have our simplified three D shape. You can do this with any object, and I know it's not a perfect rendition of a mountain range. It looks a little bit more like a theater backdrop, A flat like this. But I think this is an interesting style that you can use for your designs if you'd like. To finish off this snowy mountain peak, I need to add some snow. I'll press P to get out the pen tool. Then I'm just going to trace starting on the outside of the shape and going inward like this, I'll bring it up. I'm going to make this a child layer to the front piece. It's okay if it's going outside of the shape like this. Then I'll just go around the outside to connect it. I know this looks a little strange, but I'm just focusing on the areas where it's overlapping with this front piece here. I'll just make this a nice light color, and then I'll make it a child layer to the front piece. Now you can see our beautiful snowy mountains. I might want to actually adjust the nodes. I'll press A for the node tool. We can always move this around a little. There we go. I think that looks better. Great job with this first example. As you can see, the node tool can completely transform a shape. Can you believe that this started as a triangle? I'm going to do a similar effect to these three triangles to turn them into a three D pine tree. As you can see over here in the layers. These are three separate triangles that I just put together, one on top of the other. I made this one a little bit bigger at the bottom, this one's a little smaller at the top. I'm going to select all of these layers and add them together with the add operation. Then I'll press V for the tool and I'll hold command or control and shift to move it forward. I'll take the back piece and I'll make that a darker color. Then I'll connect the two pieces using the Pen tool. I'll press P for the Pen tool, and I'll start right at the top here. I'll click, and then I'll click on the other side. I'm just going to bring it down and click on the very bottom and bring it around. I'm going to sample this dark tree right here. I'll apply that. Now you can see that we've connected only the top points. Let me just adjust this here. Make sure that lines up nicely with that corner of the shape. O The reason why I only connected the top and bottom is because I wanted to give us a little extra practice with adding and adjusting nodes on existing shapes. Let's go ahead and add a node by clicking right here. I'm going to drag this down so it connects with this shape right here. I'll add another node here and I'll connect it to this point. It's super easy to add nodes to alter your shape. Just click and move, and I'll move this point as well. Make sure this is nice and lined up here. That looks pretty good. Now you can see those two pieces look like they're perfectly connected. I'm just going to select our pen path and the back piece by holding shift. Then I'll click on the Ad operation to add them together. I'm just going to hold shift and select both of these layers, and then I'll press command or Control G to group them together. Now that we're done with those two shapes, I'm just going to duplicate the tree and adjust the sizes to finish this mountain seam. First, I'm going to group the mountains together though. We just have two groups now and now I'll quickly adjust their sizes. With that, I'll just press command or control quotation marks to remove the grid. And now we can see the whole scene. And we're done this mini project was really fun. Now that you know all about the, the next video will be ai as we learn how to create that don't perfectly align with the grid. 12. Off Angles: In this video, we'll learn how to create off angles. There are times when you create an object and it might not look quite right if you follow the isometric grid lines. We're going to create an open cardboard box in this video to see this inaction. Now, you probably noticed that this exercise file has a bunch of colors up here, and that's because from this video until the end of the chapter, we're going to build a scene in this document. This first color is for this video, for the cardboard box, and later we'll create objects with the other colors. Also, double check your grid settings for this exercise file. It should be the same as we've been working with set to advanced isometric and eight divisions. First, let's make a cardboard box, complete with tape as an added detail. Like we've already done, let's make a simple cube. I'll select the rectangle tool and we'll edit in plane for the top plane. I'm going to start at one of the cross sections and I'll hold shift to make a perfect square that goes six large squares, one, two, three, four, five, six. Once you have that down, I'm just going to make this a slightly lighter color. Then I'm going to change to the front plane. I'll press escape so that this layer is no longer selected, then I'll hold shift and I'll drag out. I'm going to make this side the medium brown color that we have in our swatch. Let's switch to the side plane, line it up. Hold shift. There we go, and I'll make this one the darkest side. For the tape details that I'd like to add. I'm going to add them on the right side and then they'll go over the top of the box. I'm going to switch my plane to the front plane because that's the one we'll work in first. Then I'll go to the center of this box, and I'll go over one square to start our tape, and I'll bring it over one more square. This should be nice and centered on this face of the box. Then I'll just make this a lighter color for the tape. Very nice. Then I'm going to add one more little detail here. First press Escape, then go to the very center again and go over a half square. It's not going to snap to the half square, just give it your best guess, and then go to the other side like that. You should have a half square on each side of the center line and you can go ahead and drag this all the way to the bottom here. Make this an even lighter color. There we go. Then I just want to make sure this is nice and centered. I'll press V for the move tool. I'll hold shift. Then I'm just going to click and drag until you see that blue line and that red line indicating that this is lined up and centered. Now that we have that nice tape detail done. I'm going to select both of its layers, and I'll press command or Control G to group it. Then I'll duplicate this group by holding command or control, and I'll just click and drag over here. I want this to go across the top of our box. I'll go to the top plane, and then I'm going to press fit to plane. We haven't used that feature much in this course. It's nice to see it in action. I'm going to line up this tape so that it lines up right on the corner, this corner of this piece of tape and this corner. Then I'll drag it out like that. I wanted to line up on this edge as well. I'll go to this node and just drag it out like that. You can see that this is expanding past the edges of the top of the box. I'm going to make this a child layer to the top of the box. I'm also going to turn off our grid with command or control quotation marks, so I can see our colors better. I think since the top of the box is a lighter color, I should make the tape a lighter color as well. For the skinnier rectangle, I'm going to make this pure white. For the outer rectangle, I'll just make this a little lighter. There we go. That looks pretty good for our taped up closed box. I'm just going to take this piece of tape and I'll make it a child layer to the side it belongs on. Before we finish with this box, I actually want to add some gradients to make it look nicer. I'm just going to do it to the sides of the box, not the actual tape. To start, I'll go to the darkest side. I'll grab the gradient tool. Then I'll click and drag from the top to the bottom. I forgot to switch to the proper plane, so I'm going to need to adjust these nodes here. There we go. Nice and subtle. I dragged it more outward so that it's more subtle with the colors, and I think that looks nice. I'll do the same for this one. I'll click from the top to the bottom. I forgot to change the plane. Again, I need to practice that. That looks pretty good. It's a little saturated, so I'm going to change the color of this node to tone it down. Last, we can do the top of the box. Since this is the darkest side over here, I think the light is shining in that direction. I think I'll go ahead and drag from here over. I'm editing in top, edit in plan. There we go. Now it's perfectly aligned with the grid. I'm just going to change this node so it's not quite so saturated. There we go. Drag it out. All right. Now you can see we have the beautiful gradients and our box is complete. I'll hold shift to select all of those layers, and I'll press command or control G to group them together. With this box done, I'm going to grab the move tool and I'll just move it over to the side. Then I'm going to duplicate it. I'll hold command or control, and I'll move it over. For this duplicate copy, I want to move the tape to the other side. Just to add some variety to our boxes because for this scene, I'm picturing having a few closed boxes and an open box. To move the tape over, I'll double click. There we go. With that layer selected, I'm just going to hold down shift to move it over to this side. I can't see it because it's a child layer to the other layer, so I'll move it up and make it a child layer to the darkest side. Then you can see that it's at an angle right now. To make this line up perfectly with this plane, I'm going to flip it horizontal using this operation right up here. Perfect. Then I'll just hold shift and move it up. I'm trying to make it nice and centered with this side. Once you see the lines looking like this with the yellow line going vertically and the green line at the top, we're good to release, and now that's perfectly centered. For this top tape, I'll just select it. I'm going to flip this one horizontally as well. You can see this isn't perfectly aligned. I'm just going to hold shift and I'll move it up until those sides match up, and that looks pretty good. Now, because this tape has been moved to the darker side, I think it makes sense for the tape to also be darker. Starting with the skinnier rectangle, I'll just make this a little bit darker of a color, and then the outer rectangle will make even darker. Now you can see those boxes side by side with their different tape alignments. I think this looks really nice. Now that we have our two basic boxes, I'm going to make another box that's open. I'm going to duplicate the first box again by holding command or Control and clicking and dragging. I'm going to turn the grid back on with command or Control quotation marks. I'm just going to make sure this is lined up with the grid. You can see every corner is on one of the perfect corners of the grid. This looks perfect. As promised, let's begin working on our open box. First, I'm going to delete this tape layer. Then I'm going to select this left side, I'm going to hold command or control and shift, and I'm going to move it so that it aligns with this other side. I'm going to move its layer so that it is beneath this side layer. It's beneath this side, but above this top piece right here. You can see this looks like it's an open box now, this top layer is acting like the duplicate copy of this side. I'm actually going to make it the same color as that side. To make the two flaps that open the box. I'm going to make them in the top plane first. Top plane, edit in plane, and I'll select the rectangle tool. I'll press escape, so nothing selected. Then I'm going to start in one corner, I'm going to bring it over so that it's half the size of the top of the box. It's like we're making a closed box again just with two flaps. With that first one done, I'm going to do the same over here. Connecting it at the middle. Now that we have that and we know that these flaps are the perfect size. I'll press v for the move tool, and I'll hold shift to move it to the outside edge. Shift outside edge. We're all set up now. To make this flap open at an angle, we need to convert both of these flaps to curves. I'll select them both, convert to curves. The reason I'm doing this is because we need to move these outside nodes, but keep these nodes connected to the box. I'll select both of these nodes by holding shift. Then I can move them to open and close the box. You can see as I bring it around. The box looks open and closed. But notice that the radius of the edge is a little hard to control. I want this square to stay three units long. But as I move it, it's hard to tell if it's still that size. We need a guide to help us with this and a circle will be just what we need. I'm going to grab the ellipse tool, and then I'm going to change planes to the perpendicular plane. That means I'm going to change planes to the front plane. Then I'll press escape, so nothing selected. As I'm lined up to this corner perfectly, I'm going to hold down command or control and shift to make a perfect circle, that's the exact radius of this flap. Let me just change colors really quick, so you can see this better, and I'll lower the opacity. You can see that I clicked and dragged until our circle had a radius that lines up with this outside edge of this flap. Now that we have this circle done, we can use this as a guide as we adjust these two outer nodes. As I click and drag, I'm going to try to line up right there. Perfect. I'm going to try to line it up so that the circle gets highlighted in yellow. That's how we'll know that this is the perfect radius. If I stop right there, that flap is now the perfect size. That's a good position for it. I could also bring it in more so it's partially closed. Or I can bring it down here. At all of these points, we know that the radius is three squares, so it's the perfect fit for this flap. If your yellow line isn't showing up, it's because you need to have snap to selected geometry of the curve turned on. Double check that you have that. We can repeat the same process for the other flap. I'm just going to select the circle, I'll press V for the move tool, and while holding shift, I'll move it over so that it lines up with that edge. Then we can do the same thing again. I'll press A for the node tool. I'll hold shift to select both of these points. Now we can go ahead and move this along, looking for that yellow highlight to make sure that these are aligned perfectly. I'm going to select both of these flaps, and I'm going to make them a lighter color so we can see them a little better. But you can see now these flaps look great. Now that I think about it, cardboard boxes usually have four flaps. Let's make those too. I'm going to go back to the top plane. I'll select the rectangle tool and make sure we're an edit in plane. I'll press Escape. Since I know that the flaps are three squares in width, I'm just going to make them outside of the box this time. Perfect. Now we're working on a different plane. Since these are going in this direction, our circle guide needs to be on this plane, on the side plane. I'm going to change to the side plane. I'm going to grab the ellipse tool. Then lining up with that corner, I'll hold command and shift to make a perfect circle that lines up with three squares for the radius. I'll make this that same bright color and I'll lower the opacity. Now we can use this circle as our guide for the other flaps. I'll select both of the rectangles and I'll convert them to curves so that we have access to those nodes. Then I'll hold shift to select both of those nodes, and we can go ahead and adjust how this one is positioned. I think I want this one to be a little bit more like that, so it looks more closed. Then I'll grab this guide. I'll switch to the move tool. I'll hold shift and move it over. There we go. I'll press A for the node tool. I'll hold shift to select both of those, and then I'll move this. Make sure that you have the node that's next to the circle selected, or you won't be able to get those yellow lines. I need to make sure I'm dragging this line so that I can see where that's connecting. There it is. I'm going to turn off the circles now, but you can keep these layers here so that you can move these flaps any other way you want at any time. They're just useful guides. With that done, I'll press command or control quotation marks to turn off the grid. Now I can just adjust the colors of these flaps. I want to keep all of the flaps this lighter color. But using the gradient will help to distinguish them from each other. You see how these two are blending into each other. I'll select that flap. Since these are all on an off angle, it's a little tricky to light them. But I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to darken each of them toward the bottom of the box. For this one, I'll start in the center and drag it outward. I'll just make this a slightly darker color. Go in this direction. It's a little tricky to do this with the weird angles, but I think that looks pretty good. There we go. That makes more sense. I aligned this line, so it lined up perfectly with the edge, and I think that looks pretty good. I did a little more adjusting, but I think that looks good. I'll just go around to each of the flaps and do the same thing, starting from the top and making it darker toward the bottom. Because I want these two flaps to look more different from each other, I'm going to select this top node and make it a or maybe a little lighter. I just want them to be different colors so that they don't look too similar. That looks pretty good. Maybe I'll select this node and change this one to be a little bit darker. Now they're pretty distinct from each other. I think that color is a little too light on that one. There we go. For the last flap, start from the center and go dark, like that. With that, I'll finish, now we can go ahead and organize the layers. To do that, I'm just going to stack the boxes on top of each other. Oops, I forgot to group these layers together. First, this group can go on top. Then I'm going to take all of these and add them to this group. Now this box is all one group. I'm going to set it on top of this box. There we go. Then this one can go back here like that. Now you can see we have this nice grouping of boxes. I'll select all of their groups, I'll group them together. Then I'm going to rename this boxes. All right with that, you finished the very first set of objects for the scene that we're going to create. Great job. Go ahead and keep this file open or save it because we'll continue to work on this document in the next video. 13. Rounded Objects: Let's make a rounded object in this video. Start, I'm just going to turn off the boxes group. We'll use them later as we put together the whole scene. Something that's a little confusing about the isometric grid is what you should do when something is rounded like a lamp or a tire or even a tree. These are not boxy shapes that easily fit into the planes. With objects like this, we really only need to focus on one plane, which is the way the object interacts with the surface of the scene. I'll show you this as we make a standing floor lamp in this video. I'm going to keep the grid off for this video just so we can work a little more freely. Then I'm just going to grab the ellipse tool and I'll make sure we're editing and playing for the top plane. You can see in this visual right here that the top plane is meant to be the top of a box, but it can also act as the floor of a scene. Using the top plane, this is what our object will interact with and sit on. I'm going to hold shift and then I'll click and drag and this will be the base of our lamp. I'm going to center this in the document, and then I'll sample the color yellow from our color spotches, and I'll apply that. To make this base three D, I'll press V for the move tool. Then I'm going to duplicate this circle by holding down command or control and shift. I'll drag it upward. Now we can see we have a little bit of a cylinder shape. I'm going to make the top piece a lighter color. Then I need to connect these two pieces, so they look like one object. This is the exact same strategy we used with the mountain and the tree in that node tool video. I'll press P for the Pen tool. I'll line it up with the sides, and I'll click to add points. Click, click, connect. I'm going to make this that same dark yellow color. I'll move it beneath our top layer. Then I'm just going to check in with our nodes. They look good. I'll hold shift to select our pen tool path and our bottom layer. Then I'll use the ad operation to make them one layer. Very nice. Now that we have the base of the lamp, the next thing I want to make is the stem of the lamp. The long pole that goes up and connects with the lamp shade. To do this one, I'm going to use the rectangle tool. Then I'm going to stop editing in plane. This is sticking straight up from the surface, so we do not need to edit with any plane for this part. I'm going to find the center of our circle, and then I'll hold down command or control, and I'll click and drag outward to create the beginning of our base. That way, I know it's perfectly centered, and then I can just drag it up like that. Now we have our lamp pole to make the base of the pole more rounded. I'm going to convert this rectangle to curves. Then I'll go to the center of these two points and I'll just click and drag downward to create that rounded edge. Very nice. This looks really good. Next, we're going to make the lamp shade. I'm going to select the ellipse tool, and then we'll be editing in play once again as we make this. I'll find the center of this lamp pole. Then I'll hold down command or control and shift as I click and drag out a perfect circle. I'll make this a lighter color closer to Beige. Then I'll press V for the move tool, and I'll hold command or Control and shift to duplicate and raise the shape. We could leave it at this shape if we want more of a drum lampshade. But I'd like this to be a more traditional lampshade, and I'm going to hold command or control and shift to shrink this down. That way it has that classic shape. Now I'm just going to make this top circle a little bit lighter. Then we can connect these two shapes. I'll press P for the Pen tool. Then I'll go to the very edge and I'll click click to combine these. I'll sample the darker bottom color and apply that. Then I'll lower this beneath the lighter circle. I'll press A for the node tool because we need to check in with these points. You can see that bump that we talked about earlier as we were making the mountains. I'll just line it up like that, and I'll drag this up. I think this one needs adjusting as well. I'll pull this up more and same on this side. Check that out. We have our lamp shade done to finish off this lamp. I think it would look nice if we could see the top of the lamp stem right in here. To do that, I'll select the lamp stem layer. Then I'll duplicate it, and I'll just press command or Control J to do that. That way, it stays in place. Then I'm going to drag this layer and make it a layer to the lamp opening. We can see it right there. Last, I think I want to make a little final at the top of the lamp, which is just the end cap piece. I'm going to grab the ellipse tool to do this. I'm going to turn off edit and plan to make a perfect circle right here. Once you're at the center point, just hold command or control and shift to make a perfect circle. I'll make this the same color as this lamp stem. I think I want to move it up just a little bit. I'm going to select both of the layers that are child layers to this lighter circle, and I'm going to make them both a slightly lighter color to make it look like there's light within this lampshade that's reflecting on those surfaces. You might be wondering why I turned off, edit and plane to make this circle shape up here. Here's how I see it. If an object is supposed to be perfectly spherical like a beach ball or a grape fruit, then I need to make them perfect circles that don't go with the plane. In this case, this top final detail of the lamp is a perfect sphere. It would look deflated and strange if it went with the plane. You can break the rules of the grid. When you're working with objects like that, We'll see plenty of more examples of these types of objects later on as we make trees. We'll get plenty of practice with breaking the rules. Let's finish this lamp by adding some gradients. Because we're not working with the planes very much, I like to add realism by taking the colors from light to dark around the curve. To start, I'm going to select the lamp shade. It looks like I forgot to combine these two shapes. I'll hold shift to select them and then I'll add them together. Now we can treat this as one shape. I'll get the gradient tool, and I'm just going to click and drag across like that. I'm not editing and plan, so our gradient should be nice and simple, just a straight line. I'll take this node and make it a darker color like that. I'll do the same thing with the stem. Clicking and dragging from one side to the other. You can hold shift if you want this to be a perfectly straight line, which I do. I'll hold shift as I'm clicking and dragging. Last, let's do this base right here. Start from one edge, hold shift, click and drag. Very nice. Now you can see that added realism, just around those curved edges, I'm going to leave this top alone and the inside of the lamp alone. I think those should be pretty evenly. Now that we're done with that, I'm just going to select all of our layers by holding shift and I'll press command or Control G to group them. Great job creating this rounded object in this video. Go ahead and keep this file open or save it because we'll continue working on this document in the next video. Where we'll learn more about irregular objects with rounded edges. 14. Rounded Edges: This video we'll learn more about rounded edges as we do our most ambitious project of the chapter. We're going to make a couch. This couch will have three seat cushions and two rolled arm details at the sides. We'll break this down by first creating a single seat that will duplicate a few times. Then we'll do the same with the rolled arms. Let's start with the seat. First, I'm going to press command or Control quotation marks so that we can bring our grid back up. Then I'll grab the rectangle tool and I'll start by making the back of the seat. I'll go to the front plane edit and plane, and then I'll line up my cursor with the edge of a square. Then I can just click and drag to bring a rectangle out, something like that. Then I'm just going to get my color picker and I'll sample this pink color from our swatches. I want the back of the couch to be curved just to make it look softer. I'm going to grab the corner tool. Then we can go ahead and curve these top corners inward. Now, as I do this, you might notice that one of the corners seems to be curving in a lot more than the other one. I think this has something to do with working at an angle. Just to alter this a little bit more, I'm going to curve this one in a little bit more. I'll grab the corner tool once again, and I'm just going to drag this node in a little bit more so they match better. Then I'm going to make the top of the seat. I'll go to the top plane and grab the rectangle tool and I'll press escape, and then I'll start it somewhere around here. I'll drag it so it lines up on both edges, and then I'll pull it out. For this bottom cushion, I want this to look a little rounder. I'm going to convert this to curves. Then with the node tool out, I'm just going to go to the middle of each of these lines and I'll pull it out to create a plush look for this seat. Very nice. We have the base of our couch seat. Now we just need to make it three D. I'll press V to get out the move tool. Then I'm going to duplicate this seat. I'll press command or control and shift to drag it downward. I'm going to make this a darker color and I'll bring it underneath the top of the seat. Now we just need to connect the two. I'll press P for the Pen tool. Then I can go ahead and begin connecting these. I'll connect it at the corners here, and the corners in the back. I'll sample that darker color. Very nice. Let's double check on the nodes. They look good. I'm going to select both of those lower layers and I'll add them together. Now you can see our seat is finished. Now, they're blending together right now, these two planes. I think I'll take this top one right here and I'm going to make this a lighter color. Next, we're going to make this part of the seat look three D. I'll press V for the move tool so that we can duplicate this. Then I'll press command or control and shift, and I'll just move it backward. I'll make this one a little bit of a darker color and I'll bring it underneath. Then I'll press P for the Pen tool so that we can connect these two pieces. I'll make that the same color as the dark part of the seat, checking in with the nodes. I don't think I made them the exact same color. I'll just select them both and I'll apply the color of the color picker to those, and then I'll add them together. We're almost done with the basic shape of the seat. The last thing I want to do to finish off the seat shape is to make it look like the seat is sitting on a solid base down here. To do this, first, I'm just going to adjust the shapes that I already have. Starting with the shape I actually have selected, I'll press A for the node. Then I'm going to drag this node out so that it's in line with the rest of these, and I'm going to drag it until it lines up with that corner right there. You can see that yellow line guiding me. That means it's lined up with that. Then I'll just take this node and drag it so that this one lines up with that corner. You can see this pink rectangle right here is connected to the back of the seat. I'll select that shape. I'll add a node there and there, and then I'll just delete this node. Now we have the side of the seat done. Let's do the front next. I'll just grab the rectangle tool for this. Starting at this corner, I'll click and drag out. Whoops. I need to make sure I'm working in the proper plane. I'll go to the front plane, and then I'll click and drag to add this piece. We have the basic seat, but these shapes honestly look a little confusing to me right now because they're all such similar colors. I want to add some gradients to fix this. First, I'm going to start with the top of the seat. I'll get the gradient tool. Then I'm going to click and drag in this direction. I'm actually going to undo that with command or Control Z because I don't want to edit in plain this time. This time, I'm just going to click and drag I'll make this a more subtle color, but I want it to go from subtly dark on this edge to lighter toward the center. This is because all of the seats we're going to duplicate are going to be on this side of the cushion. I want this to look like the cushions are casting shadows on each other. Next, we'll move on to this lower part. For this one, I want it darker over here and lighter over here. I'll click and drag and then I'll make this one a lighter color, similar to the back of the chair. That's much better. While we're at the front of the chair, I'll do this piece next. I want it to be the same color as this, but go a little bit darker toward the top, so it looks like a shadow. To do this, I'm going to select this bottom node. I'll use that sampled color again. Then this one can be a darker color, but maybe not that. Something like that to create a little bit of shadow under the cushion. Very nice. Last, we just have to do these pieces over here. Since this is all one piece, the way I'm going to do this is I'll click and drag upward and the top of the chair should be a light color. I'll sample this light color from the top of our cushion. And I'll bring it like this because this is where the plane switches from the top to the dark side. I think I'll change this color just to be a little bit lighter. There we go. Last, we have the back of the seat. I almost forgot. I'm going to click and drag just to create a little bit of a shadow there. I'll press V for the move tool because I want to check in with our points over here. There seems to be a gap. Yes, there is. I'll press A for the node tool, and I'll just drag this in. Here we go. Just double checking my points there. With that, our seat is finished. I'm going to select all of these layers by holding shift and clicking, and then I'll press command or Control G to group them. I'm just going to double click to rename this seat one. Perfect. Now, all I need to do is duplicate this twice. I'll grab the tool. Maybe I'll start it up here. Then I'll hold command or Control and Shift as I drag this over to duplicate That looks pretty good. Let's do that one more time. Now I can go ahead and rename these other seats. That can be sat one, Cat two, Sat three. We're almost done to finish off this couch, we're just going to make some rolled arms for the sides. First, I'm going to edit in plane in the front plane, and I'm just going to grab the ellipse tool to do that. Then I'm just going to click and drag while holding shift to create this circle right here on the edge. I'm going to make this circle the same color as the back of the seat, since they're both in the front plane. I'll just apply that and bring this to the top so we can see it. There it is. Then to create a cylinder shape, I'm just going to duplicate this and move it back. I'll get the move tool out, and then we'll hold down command or control and shift and move it on back. Last, we just need to connect these two. I'll press P for the Pen tool, and I'll just connect these. I'll make it this darker side color, and I'll move it underneath the top one. Let's make this back the same color and move it back as well. Now, I'm just going to click on this rectangle I made, and I'm going to double check on the points here using the node tool, I can go ahead and adjust this. It's a little hard to see it over here since I made it the same color. Let's alter that by adding some gradients next. First, I'll hold shift and connect these two pieces with the add operation. Then I'll grab the gradient tool and I'll drag from here to here. For the top, I'll make this the lightest color. Then for the bottom, I'll make it a nice dark color, similar to this one, but I think that blends in a little bit too much. Let me experiment here. We could make it even darker like that. Yeah, I think that looks good. I'm going to press command or control quotation marks to see our colors better because it looks like the top of this rolled arm is really blending in with the seat. I think I need to make this color just a little darker to contrast it. There we go. We're almost done. I'm just going to group this rolled command or control G. Then I'll press V for the tool so that I can duplicate this. I'll hold down command or control and shift to move it over. Then I'm going to place this rolled arm behind all of the seats. There we go. With that, we finished our couch. I'm going to select all of these layers, and I'll group them all together, and I'll just double click to rename that couch. All right, we did it. Our couch is finished. Great job. Keep this file open or save it because we'll continue working on it in the next video as we finish the room. 15. Create a Room Scene: Going to finish our room scene in this video. You might be thinking, what room? We've only made objects so far, and that's very true. Let's start off this video by building the room structure with the walls and the flooring. I'll press command or control quotation marks to bring up our grid, and then we can begin building the room. Now, setting up walls like this is very similar to building a cube. Let's go ahead and get started with the top plane first. I'll grab the rectangle tool and edit in plane. For the top plane, we're going to create the flooring with this one. I'll start down here at this cross section and while holding shift, I'll bring it across. Then I'm going to change the color of this to the brown color that we have in our swatches. Next, we can go ahead and build the walls. I'll start with the front plane. I'll press escape, and then I'll line it up on this corner right here. Instead of holding shift, I'm just going to click and drag this time to make a flatter wall. Perfect. I like how that looks. I'm going to change my color to this blue color for the walls. Next, we're going to build the other wall, but I need to change planes. I'll change to the side plane. Then I'll line it up right here and bring it over. For this wall, I'm going to make it a slightly darker blue. With that, I think all of our walls are lined up nicely. We can begin to make them three D. Starting with the side plane since I'm already here, I'm going to click and drag a rectangle starting from the center point, and I'll bring it over like this. I'll just make it one square thick like that. Then I'm going to bring it out. It's the same thickness going out one unit. I'll sample the brown color. And I'm going to make this a nice dark brown. Then I'm going to come up here and I'm going to bring a piece down like this for the side of the wall, and we'll leave those both that brown color. I'll switch to the front plane and we'll repeat this process on this other side, lining it up and bringing it over, stretching it one extra unit over here. Then I'll bring a piece down like this. For these two that I just made, I'm going to make them both a slightly lighter brown color. While holding shift, I'll select both of their layers. I think that color looks pretty nice. To finish making the walls three D, I just need the top pieces. I'll switch to the top plane. I'll line it up, and I'll bring it across plus one unit over here. I'm going to make this the same color as the flooring, and I'll repeat that for this last side. This is a really good start. But to make this look even more realistic, I'd like to add some trim to the bottoms of the walls and to the tops of the walls. It's little details like this that's really going to help sell the design. We're going to go ahead and do that next. I'm going to start in the front plane, and I'm just going to build out a little rectangle like this. This is the same thickness as the outer wall. I'm just going to make this the same color as the outer wall. We're going to use this piece to build out a piece of trim going across. Now that I have that done, I'm going to switch to the side plane, I'll press escape. I'll line it up on this corner and I'll drag it across like this. Then I'll switch this to the darkest color that we have over here. Then we just need the top of the trim, I'll switch to the top plane. I'll press escape just so we don't accidentally move that one. I'll bring it across. I'll make that the same color as the top piece. Then I'll press escape. So you can see what we have going on here. I'll press V for the move tool so I can just make sure this lines up nicely. But now you can see we have this little piece of trim going across here. I think this looks so nice. I'd like to repeat this for the other side. I'm going to with the move tool, hold shift to select all of those layers. Then while holding command or control, I'll just click and drag to duplicate it. Then I'm going to flip it horizontally using this operation up here. Now, I can just move this in place, knowing it's the perfect size, and all we need to do is adjust the colors. Since this is on a new plane now. I know that this needs to match the surrounding areas, so I'll switch it to the darkest brown. I know this piece needs to be the same as this side over here, this medium brown. I'll sample and apply that. It looks good, but I do need to bring one of these over just to finish the connection point right there. Now you can see what that looks like. This looks so good. Now all I need to do is select these layers and bring them up to duplicate them for the top. I'll hold shift to select all of those layers. It looks like they've all been selected. I'll just hold command or control and shift, and I'll raise it up. This is such a good base for our room. I'm going to press command or control quotation marks just so I can show you one thing. You might notice that there's little white lines in between our different shapes. That's because they're separate shapes right now. But if I add them all together using the add operation, those lines will disappear. Using the tool, I'm going to select those layers that are next to each other by holding shift and clicking on them. Once I have them all selected, I can just use the add operation. Now you can see they're all one piece. I'm going to repeat this on all of the different planes where the pieces are touching. Then I'm just going to select all of the layers that we just made for the walls and the trim and everything, and I'll press command or Control G to group them together, and I'll just rename them walls. Before we begin to add in all of our furniture, I want to add a window to one of the walls, just to let in some light into the room, I'm going to do it on this wall. This is the darkest wall because the light should be shining in from this direction, making the floor nice and bright and this wall nice and bright, but this wall should be left in shadow if that makes sense. I'll turn the grid back on. Then going to the side plane, I'm going to trace out a window on this wall. I'll grab the rectangle tool. And starting one, two, three, four, big squares over. I'll just click and drag, and I need to have four squares on this other side to make sure this is centered. I think that looks pretty good. I'm just going to make this white. Then I'm going to start adding some trim details to this window. Saying in the side plane. I'm just going to trace out a piece for the top and I'm going to make all of this window trim the same colors as our wood trim. I can just sample from the colors that are surrounding it. Starting with that one. I'm trying to make it the same thickness as well. When you zoom out, you can see it's one square just like these were. With all those pieces done for the outside, I'll select them all while holding shift, and then I'll use the add operation to add them into one frame. Then to make this three D, I'm just going to add some pieces to the sides and the top. Let's start with the top. I'll press Escape. I'll line it up and then I'll drag it across. This piece needs to be this lighter brown color. I'll do that. Then I'm also going to add a piece to the inside of the window here. And I'll move that underneath the window frame. Then I'll switch to the front plane. I'll add a side piece right here. I'll sample this medium brown color. And then I'll add a piece to the inside of the window like that. To make this look more like a window, I'm just going to add a couple more pieces to the side plane, the front of the window. I'm just going to add a little cross pieces right here to make it look more like a window. I'll select both of those, and I'll make them the same color as the window frame. I just stretched out the pieces so those white lines would disappear, and now you can see it all looks like one connected piece. Now that the window is done, I'll just select all of its layers and I'll group them and I'll rename this window. Now that the room is set up, we can add in all of the furniture that we made earlier. This furniture may look a little random put together. But my concept for this room was to make it look like a moving day scene. All of the boxes are all packed, and this person is either packing or packing for a big move. Now, there is one problem with resizing and that's with the couch. If you resize the couch, how it is now, you'll notice that some things get misaligned. You can see that our pen path right here sticks out and the back cushion looks more rounded than it should be. I'll press command or control Z to undo that. Let me show you how we can get around this problem. The reason that this resizes so strangely is because we use the corner tool to curve in this piece right here. If I select the corner tool right now, you can see those corners are still active and can still be altered. But if we go up to the context toolbar and bake the appearance, that will lock in those nodes. When we resize it, it should be okay now. This took me quite a while to figure out. I'm happy to share this tip with you if you run into this problem. With all of the back cushions now baked in appearance, we can go ahead and select the whole couch. And we can resize it with the move tool. Now you can see those back cushions stay nice and proportional. Now we just need to add some finishing touches to tie the whole room together. First, I'm going to add a simple rug to the floor. I'll use the rectangle tool and I'll do this in the top flame. I'll press Escape. Then I'll just click and drag to add this rectangle. I'll put it underneath all of our objects. Then I'm going to make it the same light color that we have for our lamp right here. I think that looks pretty good. One last object that I want to add is a piece of framed artwork behind the couch. I think I'll actually make the couch slightly smaller. Just so we have space on this wall here. For this framed piece of art, I'm actually going to duplicate the window, so I'll hold command or control and I'll click and drag. Then I'll flip it horizontally, so it's on the correct plane, and I'll just shrink this down so it fits in place. To turn this into framed artwork, I'm first going to select these cross pieces and I'll delete them. Then I'm going to add some squiggles to this white piece of the window, and I'll make them child layers, so we can be a little messy with this part. I'm just going to click on the outside. Then I'll click and click and drag to make a few squiggles. I'm going to make these squiggles, the last green color that we have right here. So I'll sample that and apply it as the fill color. And I'll just do this one last time. I'll select both of those layers and I'll make them child layers to the white piece. Then I'll just take my node tool and we can adjust the nodes a little. We're on to our very last step. I want to quickly add some nice shadows to this scene. I'm going to use the pen tool to trace around the objects to add those shadows. I'll start with the lamp, and I'm just going to hover over it to make it a snapping candidate. I'm also just going to go in my layers really quick and I'll select the top layer for this. Then I'll just trace over the area like that. I'm going to apply a dark brown color for the shadow. I'll make this even darker. Then I'm going to make it 20% opacity. You can see it's overlapping with our lamp, so I'll just place this underneath it. That's our first shadow done. Next, I'll do it for the boxes. I'll line up on the very edge here. I'll hold shift, so this stays in a nice proportional line here. I'll make it that same dark brown color. It's been stored over here. And then instead of switching the opacity, I'll just push two on my keyboard, and you can see that automatically changes to 20%. I'm just going to repeat this process now to add shadows to the other objects in our seam. With all of those shadows done, I want to add a transparent gradient to them to make them look even softer. Starting with the last shadow I just drew, I'll go over to where the gradient tool is. I'll click on the little triangle. Then I'll select the transparency and I can click and to make this gradient tent. This will gradually fade out the shadow. I think this just softens it nicely. I'll go to the next shadow, and I'm going to turn off Edit in plain just so we have a little more control. I'll continue this for the rest of the shadows. All right, with that final step done, we're finished with this project. That turned out to be a really big project, and I'm so proud of you for finishing it. Great, great job. Now that you're done with this chapter, in the next one, I'm going to show you my process for planning a project like this one. 16. Isometric Workflow: Last project was really fun, and I like doing it step by step with you. But you might be wondering how you can plan a project like that so that you can make isometric drawings on your own. Well, in this chapter, I'll show you my process for planning a scene, choosing colors, and a lot more. Let's get started. 17. Sketching: This video, I'll show you my process for sketching out a plan. It's so tempting to jump right into affinity designer and start creating a scene. But building objects and designer can take a long time, and if you end up not liking it, that can be really frustrating. I actually made that mistake while planning this course. Look at this scene I tried making from scratch. It's not terrible, but the scale and placement of the objects is strange with all the blank space, and the colors are really off. I could tell it wasn't going in the right direction. Look at all the detail I put into the window and the desk drawers and the chair. This took me so much longer to create than the moving day scene, and I think the moving day scene turned out so much better. That was really frustrating. The big secret to creating a beautiful scene is to sketch it out, make a plan. Personally, I'm a big fan of sketching with paper and pencil for the moving Day project. I first sketched out a room box for the walls. Then I actually started sketching the furniture pieces outside of the room. I wasn't sure what furniture I would end up using. I did a few different items, and I sketched a few different couches. I actually searched the Internet for references of different types of couches because I was having trouble drawing a couch from memory. Because I was planning this project for a course, I wanted these objects to be easy to create with the shape tools. Some of these curvy couches were a little too complicated and I scrapped them. Once I had the objects I liked, I went ahead and added them to the room. Now, one thing to keep in mind is that I'm sketching on a super small scale, super small. This is called a thumbnail and I don't remember where I learned it. I think I was watching a drawing tutorial, and the teacher said that this is a good way to quickly see the whole scene without getting distracted by the little details, and I totally agree with that. Small and messy. That's how I came up with the design for the moving day scene. But we already made that. I want to show you how to sketch a new project idea. My idea is to create an isometric board game. I love board games, and I think this will be pretty simple to create. To start sketching, I first drew a shape to represent the board. This doesn't need walls, but I did lift it onto a platform so that it looks three D. Since I already had this game board direction in mind, I also drew a grade of game spaces onto the board. With the base of the design setup. Here's where I would do some sketching outside of the board. For this design, I wanted to plan a few simple designs for the game spaces. I drew these spaces flat and off to the side to make it easier. To add some little details to the game. I wanted to add some dice and some play pieces. For the dice, it's just a simple cube. But I wanted to make sure that the dots on the dice make sense because there's actually a specific arrangement for these numbers. I went ahead and grabbed a few dice that I have, and I rolled them and these are the numbers I saw. And just a fun fact. You can always know what number is on the opposite side of the dice because the front and back side will always equal seven. That's a good party trick you can show off. Last, I wanted to make the game pieces. I'm taking a little inspiration from affinity designer beyond the basics where we made these game pieces. I drew a few versions of those. Now that I had all those objects set, I could add them to the board sketch. As I placed all those objects. I realized I'd like to have a little more detail in the center of the board. I added a circular platform for the dice to sit on. All right. We're done. This board game project is all planned out. Sketching your ideas first will save you so much time, so I highly recommend it. In the next video, I'll show you my next step for creating projects, which is choosing colors. 18. Choosing Colors: Let's choose the colors for our board game design. If you've taken any of my previous designer courses, then you already know that I love to use the website color hunt.com for finding beautiful color palettes. In this video, I want to give you a few other ideas of resources you can use. I'll also show you a new way to set up your document with your chosen colors. The Color hunt website is wonderful for finding coordinating palettes of four colors. That was really nice when doing simple designs in the other courses. But we're creating entire worlds in this course, and we need more colors to fill in all of the objects in these scenes. Strategy one for choosing colors is to use the color hunt palettes as a base and then customize your own colors to go with it. To start on the Color Hunt website. I'm just going to select a few colors that I want to use in the board game design. I have in mind to go for a cool toned look using soft colors like purple Teal and blue. Now I can just scroll until I find one that I like. Once you find one, you can click on it and save it as an image. I'll put this watch of colors in the exercise files so that you can have it as well. Now that I have those colors saved, I'm just going to open a new document in affinity designer. Then I can add that image into this document. I'll just click and drag to place that. Then we can use this to create our color swatches. You might have already noticed that I like to do this because of our first few projects. But I like to make a few squares at the top of our document that we can sample our colors from. I'll grab the rectangle tool. I'll hold shift and I'll click and drag to make our first square. Then using the tool, I'll just hold down command or control and shift, and I'll drag these across to duplicate them. I'll duplicate until I have seven squares. You might have just noticed that I've simplified the way I'm presenting the shortcuts to you at the bottom of the screen. Now instead of a large sentence telling you what to do, it's just the keystrokes down there. That way, it just simplifies things. I think you already should know the shortcuts by now, but I'll leave them there as a reminder. Once I have those squares, I'm just going to sample the colors here using the color picker and I'll apply those colors to our squares. Now that we have those, we can delete this color palette. Then the last thing we can do for this strategy is we can free hand, choose the last colors that we'll use. Now, this project is very free hand because we can choose anything. We don't have skin tones or trees or anything that has a universally accepted color to it. We can do anything we want for this board game. I'm going to choose a few other colors for contrast like red. Maybe I'll also choose an orange color. And yellow. We're finished with Strategy one. As you can see, using the color hunt as a base really helps us so that we're on the right track when we choose our other colors. That's a good setup, but I want to give you a few other ideas in case these interest you too. Another way to choose good colors is to actually physically color your sketch. Pull out some crayons or colored pencils and see what colors speak to you for your design. This will help you to know how many colors you need. You will also be constrained to the crayola color palette or whatever tools you have. I actually did this with the moving day room design. I pulled out all of the colors that I liked from my colored pencils, and then I went into designer and I found similar colors for the palette. My last idea is to look for inspiration on websites like Pinterest or dribble, or deviant arts, or Behans, wherever you like to go. I'll leave links to all of those websites below this video. Sometimes these designs won't necessarily look like anything that you're creating. But you might see some unique color combinations that could work for your design. Or if you know you have some constraints like your design is an outdoor forrest landscape, then you can go to the top of any of these websites and search for the terms that you need. For example, I'll just type in forrest flat design. Then you can go ahead and see what other people have done with similar designs. You'll be surprised at how many color variations you'll find. Your forest doesn't necessarily have to be only green, or it doesn't even have to be green at all. One thing I did as I searched for these images is I typed the word flat. Flat will give you flatter colors that you can sample from. For the board game project, I already mentioned that I wanted joe tones. As I was searching around on Pinterest, I found this beautiful flat design. This one was designed by an artist named Angela Chan, and it's so beautiful. I love that the colors are soft, but still bright. I went ahead and saved that image onto my computer, and I included it in the Exercise files too. To sample a few of the colors from that image, I'll just add it to my document. Then I can use the color picker to replace a few of my colors here. Now, I don't need to replace every color that I see, but if I see a color that I like better, that's an improvement, then we can go ahead and adjust our colors. For example, I think I want to change this teal color to this green. I'll sample that. I think I also want to replace the red with this brighter red here, and I'll replace the yellow. I think I like those colors and we'll go ahead and use them for this project. I'm not 100% sure how many colors I'll end up using or how I'll use them. But I do know that I have a beautiful palette to choose from so that I don't end up choosing dull colors as I go. Now that we have our palette and our sketch in the next video, I'll show you a few variations of grid settings that you can use for your projects. 19. Other Grid Settings: Let's learn about other ways to set up the isometric grid. So far, we've just used the default isometric setting, and it's been great. For comparison's sake, I just want to quickly set up that grid. Advanced isometric with eight divisions, and I'll make sure show grid is checked on. Then I'm going to go to the top plane, edit in plane, and using the rectangle tool. I'll just start on one of the cross sections and I'll hold shift to drag out a perfect square. We're going to compare a few other settings to this grid. I wanted to draw this out as a guide. Now let's take a look at another default setting that we can use for isometric grids, where it says grid type, instead of isometric, I'll go to two by one isometric. This will slightly shift the grid and create a flatter look. While holding shift, I'll click and drag another perfect square, and you can see that these are pretty similar, but this square is just slightly flatter. But maybe you want your grid to be even flatter. In this case, there are some special settings you can change. I'll go to the grid settings. Then I'm going to go to cube. Then we can adjust the E and the O to change up the angles. Now, there's a lot of settings in here that are a little confusing, just to simplify it. I'm going to suggest you always change the O to 45. This will line things up straight across at a 45 degree angle. Then you can change the E to change the elevation, which means that you're changing the angle and making the grid look even flatter. In this case, I'm going to type in 20, and you can see our grid got a lot more flat. I'll close out of this and still in the top plane. I'll just click and drag by holding shift to make a perfect square. Sometimes it's fun to change up the perspective this way. But I do want to show you one issue if you're customizing the grid using these cube settings. That issue is that the grid doesn't line up perfectly in every plane. You can see that we're set up at the perfect cross section between these squares here. But if I change the plane to the side plane, you can see that while we're still on this line, we're no longer at the corner cross section point. This happens on the front plane as well. In fact, it's worse on this one because it looks like it's almost intersecting, but we can see that's not true. This is just something to keep in mind with using the cube settings. Things don't line up perfectly. You might want to choose a design that's a little more free form. We're actually going to do this for the very last project of the course. Stay tuned for that and you'll see exactly what I mean by free form design. To keep things simple for this project, I'm going to change the grid settings back to our advanced and then I'll change the grid type to isometric two by one. I'll close out of that. Things got a little shifted around because I messed with the cube settings. I'm just going to use the move tool to move our second rectangle back into place. Making sure this is all set up. I'll go to the top plane and while holding shift, I'll drag it out so that it lines up perfectly with all of the sides. You can see that all of these are lined up to the cross sections, and I just wanted to show you that this two by one isometric setting, we'll keep things lined up nicely with the corners, no matter what plane it's in. Because I like the simplicity of this with everything lining up perfectly, we're going to keep the grid set to these settings for our board game project. With the grid all set up and good to go, we're going to begin creating our board game in the next video. 20. Editing Flat vs. Editing in Plane: This video we'll begin the board game project, and we'll explore editing flat versus editing with the plane. We briefly touched on this in the first chapter, editing in plane or fitting to plane. We're going to do both strategies in this video just so I can remind you of how useful fit to plane can be. First, we're going to edit in plane to create our game board. Edit in plane in the top plane, then grab the rectangle tool and while holding shift, click and drag out a square. Make sure that this square is 14 squares across. Go ahead and count that to double check. Then we can go ahead and choose the lighter purple color swatch and we can apply it to this square. Next, I want to raise this base to make it look three D, and I'm going to do that with the Pen tool. I'll press P for the Pen tool. Then I'll line it up with this corner and I'll bring it straight down one square. I'll bring it down right over here. Again, we're one square beneath this corner. I'll click. I'll click and then I'll click again, and now we have this side right here. I'm going to choose this dark purple color for this side Let me just double check that I lined everything up. That looks good. Let's do that again for this side. Again, I'll make this the dark purple. But this time I'm going to lighten it just a little bit. Last for this setup, I'm going to make a square right on the inside here of our board. This is going to be one square. Then I'll fill this with white, and I'll just double check that my points were good there. Now that we have this basic board setup, I'm going to hold shift to select all of our layers. Then I'm going to change the stroke to black, going into the stroke panel. I'm going to raise the width until it's set to five. I just want to go for a different look for this project. I think using the stroke outline will really help to emphasize all of the different shapes we'll be using. That's enough with editing in flame. Next, we're going to edit flat, and we're going to do that by making these game spaces. We drew them flat, so why not create them flat? I'll grab the rectangle tool and turn off edit in plane. Then I'll hold shift to click and drag a perfect square. I'll press V for the move tool. Then we can go ahead and duplicate this so that we have six spaces. I'll hold command or control. There we go. We have our six spaces. Next, I'm going to recreate these shapes. Let's start with this first one and make the doughnut shape. There's actually a doughnut tool for this, which is perfect. Go ahead and select that and hold shift to click and drag out this doughnut shape, and then make sure it's nice and centered in the square. I'm going to make this a child layer to that square. We can move on to the next one now. For this one, I'll make this square inside of a square. I'll grab the rectangle tool, and I'll just hold shift to click and drag, and I'll make sure this one centered. The next one we're going to make is pretty similar. It's just reversed colors. Using the move tool, I'll just hold command or control and duplicate it across. I'll make sure this is centered, and I'll set it as a child layer. Very nice. Let's do this one next. It looks pretty simple. I'll grab the rectangle tool, and I'll click and drag across. Then I'll grab its layer and I'll make it a child layer. We're almost done. Our next two are a little trickier. Let's start with this diagonal line. I'll use this square to do it. I'll press Escape and then I'll click and drag out like that. Then I'll hold shift to rotate this 45 degrees. Once you see that it's 45 degrees, you can release and use the move tool to make sure that this is placed nicely. I want it to line up with the edges. That looks pretty good. Then I'll drag it down. Because this is going to be a child layer, we can actually stretch it extra like this and then place it as a child layer and it'll fill the space perfectly. The next one we're going to create is an x, and I'm actually going to use this diagonal line for it. I'll hold command or control and I'll just duplicate it across, and I'll make it a child layer to the last rectangle here. I'm going to line this up nicely. Then I'll duplicate it with command or control J. Then I'll hold shift to rotate it 45 degrees. With that nicely lined up. We can select both of these child layers and add them together. With that finished, we can go ahead and change up these colors using the color swatches, and you can go ahead and use any colors you want for these. Once you have the colors, how you want them, we can go ahead and select all of these layers. Then press fit to plane. Now we can go ahead and place these into our gameboard. I'll start with this one. I'll place it, so it's lined up perfectly right here. Then while holding shift, I'm just going to make sure that this fits two spaces perfectly. Then we can go ahead and place the other spaces. We don't have enough spaces to fill the whole perimeter of this board. I'm going to grab the rectangle tool, I press escape, so nothing selected. Then I'm going to edit and plain and I'll click and drag out while holding shift to fill the squares like that. I'll make this white, and this can be another free space that we can use. Now I'm just going to duplicate the spaces around the gameboard to fill up the whole perimeter. I just finished with all of those game spaces. Over here in the layers, just to keep things organized. I'm going to select all of those spaces by holding shift and clicking, and then I'll group them with Command or Control G. I think I accidentally included the main big square here. I'll just drag that out. I'm going to make this the same purple color that we have out here. As you can see, it's pretty easy to edit a shape flat and then fit it to play afterward to fit your design. Feel free to use this technique if it makes more sense for the object that you're working on. In the next video, I'll show you a very useful trick for editing colors quickly. 21. Select Same: In this video, I'll show you a wonderful feature called Select Same. A lot of the time, you'll like the original colors that you chose. But once you see all of those colors in the scene, you might want to adjust them a little bit. Personally, for this design. I think all of these colors look a little saturated put together, and it might be nice to have more muted colors mixed in to contrast that saturation. For example, the only muted color I really see is this blue color, and I think it looks really nice against the brighter colors surrounding it. But here's the problem. We have multiple layers going on where all of these colors are. For example, if I want to alter the blue, I'll need to select all of the blue layers and child layers and then change them all at the same time so we can get an accurate view. But actually, that's not a problem because there's a great feature that'll do all of that work for us. To use that feature. All you need to do is select a layer that has the color that you want to change. I'll select one of these blue layers. Then you can go up to the top of your screen to select select same fill color. Now all of the blue layers are selected. I can go over to the color panel and adjust this. The really nice thing is, even the color swatch become selected, so everything can stay nice and consistent. I think I'll make the blue color a little lighter and softer. I think another color that needs some work is the purple color. I just think this color is so bright, and I think it's distracting from the real star of the design, which are the game spaces. I'll select the purple right up here from the watch. Then I'll go to select select fill color. Now I can make this color a little bit more muted and light, and you can see how that looks. I think that's already a big improvement. Now another thing I want to show you is that you can actually change the stroke color. I'll select a layer that has a stroke. Then I'll go back up to select, select same. Then this time, we can go to stroke color. This pretty much selects everything in our design because we gave everything a stroke, and now I can go to that stroke color and I can adjust it. For example, maybe we want a n dark blue stroke. And I think that looks pretty good. Now, one tip I have for you when using this feature is that you need to use the select same before you add any gradients to your design. Once you have gradients and your colors are no longer flat, it's harder to use this feature because the colors just have a lot of variation. It's hard to select multiple layers. I love this feature. It can absolutely save the colors in your design. Now that we have all of this finished in the next video, we're going to finish this design by adding in the last details. 22. Finishing the Board Game: Let's finish off this board game project. Here's our plan for this video. We need to add the platform for the dice, the actual dice, and the game pieces. Once we have all of those design elements finished, we can look into adding some gradients and shadows to finish off the design. Let's start by adding the platform to the middle of the board. I'm going to grab the ellipse tool and we'll edit in plan in the top plane. Then we can find the center of the board. While holding command or control and shift, we can click and drag to add in this circle. This circle shape has the dark blue stroke and a purple fill. That dark blue stroke is perfect because I want all of our shapes to match. But I'm going to take that fill and I'm going to sample the darkest purple color, and I'll fill it with that. Next, we're going to duplicate and raise this up to create a platform. I'll press V for the move tool. Then I'm just going to raise this up by holding command or control and shift and raising it like that. I'll press P for the Pen tool so that we can connect these sides. It can be a little tricky to line this up because of the strokes that are sticking out of these shapes. Just be careful to double check that everything looks really nice and lined up. I'll press A for the node tool to adjust this one. Here we go. Now I'm going to make this shape, the dark purple color, and I'll add it together with the bottom shape. I'll use the add operation. Then I'm going to take this top circle, and I'm actually going to sample this color that we had over on the side. Still dark purple, just a little bit lighter. To finish this platform, I'll grab the ellipse tool, and starting in the center, I'll hold command or control and shift. Add another circle detail. This one, I'm going to make the light purple color of the gameboard. And with that, we're finished with the platform, so I'll select all of those layers and I'll group them with command or Control G. That was the first thing we needed to finish. Let's move on to making the dice next. I'm going to use Edit in plane to make the dice, and I'll start by grabbing the rectangle tool, Edit in plane, top plane. Then I'm just going to hold shift to drag out a small square. I'll make this top color white. Then we'll move on to the side plane, I'll press escape, I'll line it up and while holding shift, I'll drag it out. This one, I'll make a slightly purple color. Then I'll go to the front plane, line it up, hold shift. I'll make this one slightly lighter purple. The reason why I'm adding purple to this white shape is that these dice are going to sit on the purple gameboard, and I think that it makes sense for the purple to reflect onto the white. Now that we have those shapes done, we can add the dots. I'll grab the ellipse tool and starting in the front plane. Let's add these two right up here. I'll just zoom in a little bit. And we're holding shift to make a perfect circle. I'll just drag that out. Over in the color panel, I'm going to switch these two colors. We have dark blue as the fill. Then I'll go to the stroke and remove it. We should just have dark blue as a fill applied to this circle. I'll hold shift to make it a little bit bigger. There we go. Then using the move tool, I'll just press V. I'm going to line this up and then duplicate it with command or control and shift. I'll just drag it down like that. I'll select both of these shapes, and I'll just make sure that this is nice and centered. That looks good. I'm going to make these a child layer to the proper side here. Then we can move on to adding the other dots. We had two. Let's do this four next. To make the four, I'm going to select the dots here. Then while holding command or control, I'm going to move them over here and take them out of this group. I'm going to go to the side plane and fit to plane. Then I'm just going to make sure they're nice and centered here. The reason I duplicated them is I wanted the dots to be the same size and I wanted them to be in a similar position. Now that we have those dots, I can just select one of them and hold command or control and shift to move it over. I'll line it up, so it's perfectly in between those two, and I'll do the same for this bottom one. Perfect. I'll take all of those dots and make them a child layer to its side. Now we can finish with the top one. For the top, we just have one dot. I can just select one of these and I'll hold command or control to duplicate it and I'll move it out of its group. Then I'll go to the top plane and fit to plane. I'll make sure this is nice and centered here and it is perfect. I'll make it a child layer to its side. Then we can group all of these dice pieces together with command or Control G. Now that we have this first one finished, it's going to make the next one easier because we're just going to duplicate it. I'll press V for the move tool, and then I'll hold command or control to duplicate it. Let's start by doing the top five. I'll leave this.in place, but I'm going to take these four right here and I'm going to duplicate them to the top. While holding shift, I'll select all of those, and I'll hold command or control to duplicate them up. I'm going to raise them out of the group. Then I'm going to fit them to the top plane. I'll make sure these are nice and centered here. Beautiful. We have the five for the top all done. I'll put these dots into the group for the top piece. Now you can see all of those are together, and we can continue with the other ones. Next, why don't we do the three on the side? I'll just double click to select one of these. Then I'll hold command or Control and shift to duplicate it to the center. These are a little closer together than I'd like. I'm just going to select one of these and while holding shift. I'll just drag it up a little bit. And I'll do the same for this one. Very nice. For the last side, we just need one dot. I'll just double click to select that one. I'll delete all of those and bring this to the center. With that, we have both of our dice done. I'll select them both, and using the move tool. I'm just going to bring them down and in place. I think I'm going to increase their size a little bit. I'll hold shift to do that. Then we can place them nicely. Now we're on to the last object that we need to add, which are the game pieces. I'm just going to zoom into one of the spaces and we'll make the game piece right here. First, let's make the base of the piece. I'll grab the ellipse tool and we'll edit in the top plane. I'll just line it up right here and I'll hold command or control and shift, and then I'll click and drag. Now, right now, we have this dark blue color as a fill. I'll switch that so that it becomes a stroke. Then I'm going to take the fill color and I'll sample this red color. This will be a red piece. Then let's raise this to become a platform. I'll press V to get the move tool. Then I'll hold command or control and shift, and I'll move this up. Now, as I'm working with this, I'm realizing that the stroke looks a little thick for these smaller pieces. I think I actually want to select all of these layers, and I'll go to the stroke panel, and I'll just bring the stroke down to three. So that stroke doesn't look so chunky on these shapes. With that fixed, we can continue here. I'll press P for the Pen tool and I'll connect the sides. Again, I'll just double check the placement here. There we go. Oh, I didn't finish my shape. With that node selected, I'll press P, and I'll close it like that. Back to the color panel. I'll apply the red color. I'll bring this down and I'll select that layer and the bottom to add them together. Now, this shape, I think I'll make a slightly darker red Perfect. Now, we're just going to continue by building this up and giving it a little top right here. Let's start with the top. I'll grab the ellipse tool and I'll stop editing in play. Then I'm going to line this up so I see this yellow line indicating I'm centered, and I'll just hold command or control and shift, and I'll drag out a little circle like that. I'll make this the lighter red color. Using the move tool, I'll just raise this up a little bit. Now to finish this piece, I can just connect it like that to create that game piece shape. To do that, I'll press P for the Pen tool. I'll line it up on this side. Then I'll connect with one of these sides here and I'll click and drag like that to make a curve. Then I'm going to go to the center. When you see this yellow line, go ahead and click. I'll click in the center here, and then I'll bring it back around. I'm only creating half of this scoop shape. I'll add the red color as a fill. Then I'm going to duplicate this half on the other side to make sure it's perfectly symmetrical. I'll press V for the move tool, I'll press command or Control J. Then I'm going to flip this shape horizontally. I'll hold shift to move it over, nice and straight. There we go. At this time, if your tops are jutting out, just press A for the node tool and bring those in a little bit. Then we can take those two shapes and use the add operation. In fact, I think I want this added to this shape right here. You can drag this down, select them both, and then use the ad operation. Now we have our perfect game piece shape. Now I'm just going to move this around the board. I think I'll select all of these layers and group them. Then I'll just move this a little off to the side. I'll duplicate it by holding down command or control. I'll just move one piece over here and one piece over here. I'm not placing them perfectly in the center of the spaces because I want this to look like there's a real game going on and people are just placing the pieces halfhazardly. To finish these pieces, they need to be different colors. Starting with this first one, I'll select the top two layers, and I'll make them this yellow color. For the bottom part, I'll make it yellow but darker. Let's do the same for this piece over here. I'll select the top two layers, and I'll make them green. Then I'll take the bottom platform area. I'll make that green but darker. Now that we have those final pieces done, we can go ahead and add some shadows to the board. First, I think this platform would cast a shadow right here. To do that shadow, I'll select the top circle. I'll duplicate it by holding command or control and I'll just drag it over here. Then I'm going to bring it outside of the group and underneath that platform group like this. Then I'll go to the colors, I'll remove the fill color and then swap the colors. Now the dark blue color is the fill. I'm going to make it 20% opacity by pressing two on my keyboard. Now we have this lovely shadow going off to the side here. I'm going to repeat this process to add shadows to the other shapes. Okay, these shadows look pretty good. We can always adjust how they're placed. Okay. And now to finish off the shadows, I'm just going to add a transparent gradient to them. One final detail that I want to add to this design is I want to add some dots to the edges to create a pop art effect. To start this, I'll just zoom in here. I'll grab the ellipse tool, and then I'm going to edit in the front plane. I'm just going to add three dots. I'll hold command or control and shift. I'll add three dots that are evenly spaced like that. I'll select them all. I'll press V for the move tool. I'll make sure this is nice and centered. Then to repeat these dots across the side. I'm just going to hold down command or control and shift, and I'll move them over. Then I'll press command or Control J to power duplicate. I'll just do that all the way across. We're going to have a lot of layers. Once you have that all the way duplicated, you're going to select all of these dot layers. Make sure you have the top one selected. Then scroll all the way down. There we go. Hold shift to select them all and then command or Control G to group them. Make sure they're nice and centered on this side here. Perfect. Then we're going to take this group and duplicate it with command or Control J. Then I'm just going to flip this horizontally using this top operation and I'll center it on this side. To make this side a little less harsh. I'm going to select the group, and I'm just going to lower the opacity a little bit. But now you can see we have our pop artifact on the sides. With that, we're done. We can go ahead and turn off the sketch and the swatches. We can select all of our layers and group them. I'll press command or control marks to turn off the grid. Now we can center up our design. If we want, we can even add a background color at this point. I think I'll add a rectangle, I'll turn off edit in plane. I'll bring this under our design. I think I'll make this a nice light purple color. All right. Great job on this board game project. I hope you had fun with it. Now that you have all of these great strategies, for the rest of the course, we'll focus on completing three start to finish projects together. 23. Dollhouse Project: This chapter we'll build a doll house together. To keep the videos a reasonable length, we'll break this up into a lot of small little pieces and by the end, we'll have an absolutely adorable final result. Let's get started. 24. House Framing: Let's start off this project by framing out our doll house. Before we start, I'll show you the sketch I made, just so you know the direction we're going in. It's a cute, simple doll house with two floors and little details throughout to make it interesting. I made an exercise file to make choosing the colors nice and easy for this project, but I didn't set up the grid settings. Let's do that now. For this one, I'm going to go with isometric two by one. With eight divisions and I'll turn on show grid. To start, we're going to build the outside frame of the doll house. Let's grab the rectangle tool and we'll edit in the top flame. I'm going to come down here nice and low to make the ground floor. This will be six large squares by nine large squares. So go ahead and count to double check that you have the right amount of squares. If these cross sections are a little bit distracting, just zoom out a little and you should see the main big squares here. I'm going to make this the brown color. And I'll give it a black stroke. Let's change the stroke width two, three, and we'll use that same stroke width on all of our objects throughout this project. Now that we have the floor, I'm going to make the outer wall on this side. I'll press escape. I'll line it up with the corner. Before I click and drag, I need to make sure that we're working in the side plane. There we go. Lining it up again. I'll click and drag to extend this. I want this to be 14 squares tall and I'll make this shape blue for the fill. I'll press V for the move tool. Then I'm going to duplicate this across for this side of the wall. I'll hold command or control and shift and all line it up on the other side. Now, this is going to be inside of the house, I'll change the color to yellow. Next, let's make the roof. I'm going to go to the top plane and using the rectangle tool. I'm just going to line it up with the edge of the house and I'll drag it out, and I want this to be in the exact center of this space. It should be 4.5 squares wide. Now, the roof of this project will be made a little differently than we're used to. If you remember with opening the cardboard box, we made a circle guide so that the radius would stay exactly the same. But if we did that with the roof, then the top of the roof won't meet. There would be an opening. I don't want there to be an opening. Instead of using a guiding circle, we're just going to move those nodes straight up without a circle. I'll convert this to curves. I'll select those two nodes that I want to move. Then I'm going to change the plane to this side plane, I'm going to follow this line straight up. I'll hold shift and drag this up. I'm going to drag it until it meets the other line of the roof. Then I'll just change the color to red. To finish off these main areas. I just want to make a back wall. I'll grab the rectangle tool and change to the front plane. Then I'll click and drag. To add that, I'm going to make this the yellow color. But slightly darker. Then I'll move this underneath our layers there. Now you can see what we're looking like. We have the outer box of our doll house. Now we can start adding a few little details. The first detail is, I want to add a second floor. I'll press V for the move tool and I'll select this floor. Then while holding command or control and shift, I'm just going to drag this up. I want to be able to see this, so I'll bring it above that back wall and above that side wall. I think we need to rearrange our layers a little bit. This should be behind the blue wall, but in front of the other walls. Ater on so that we can get from the bottom floor to the top. We're going to add a tilted ladder right here. I'm actually going to bring this in just a little bit so that we can make space for that. With that done, the next detail I want to add is I want to make all of these elements look more three D. I'm going to add an outer trim. That's a large square wide and white, and it'll be white for every area here, so that'll make it pretty easy. To start, I'll grab the rectangle tool and working in the front plane. I'm just going to start a little bit outside, and then I'll bring it over. This is half of a large square. There we go. Half of a large square sticking out on either side. I'll make this a white fill, and this will be our base starting point for all of the other ones. Next, I'm going to make a side piece going off in this direction. I'll press escape, I'll line it up and drag it out. Then I need a top piece right here. I'll switch to the top plane. I'll line it up and then click and drag. I need the other side to match, but we really just need a top piece. I'll click and drag to add that. I need this to be placed behind the walls. I'll just drag this down so it's underneath all of our layers. Next, let's add some trim to this side right here. I'll go to the front plane. I'll line it up on this corner, and then I'll drag it up so it's half a square wide. Right now it's placed under everything like our last layer. I'll just bring this to the top of everything. I'll just lower it down so it meets at that corner. Then I'll press V for the move tool and we can duplicate this across for the other side. I'll hold command or control and shift and bring it over. Before I finish this top area, that's going to be a little trickier. I'm going to add some trim to the side of the roof right here that mimics this. I'm actually going to hold shift and select these two layers. Then I'll hold command or control and drag it up. Just like that. I'll hold command or control and bring this to the other side. P We don't need this side piece anymore, so I'll just delete that. But we do need at square right here. We also need a little square right here. I'm going to grab the pen tool and we're going to connect this to here. Then we're going to bring it up so it's one half square down from this top area. I'll bring it down here. Over and up like that. I'll connect to the very top point here. And I'll bring it down. In the end, you should have a piece that looks like this. But you can see that this angle looks a little strange right here. It looks thinner at the top and thicker at the bottom. So I'll press A for the node tool so that I can adjust this. I think that looks pretty good, but it's a little strange that it's at a diagonal. But if it works, it works. I'm not going to argue with that. Let's go ahead and leave that as is. Then I'm going to connect the piece I just traced to the side pieces and this bottom piece so that we no longer have division lines. I'll grab the move tool and I'll hold shift to select these pieces of trim and this bottom piece. Then I'll use the add operation to add them together. I'll place it on top of everything. Now you can see our trim is done. That was a tricky for this top area, but hopefully, you got a piece of trim that looks similar to this. Now that we have all those pieces done, we can do some slight color alterations. I'm going to leave the top plane as pure white. Then I'm going to take this front plane piece, and I'm going to make this slightly yellow. Then I'm going to take this piece and this piece, the two pieces that we have on the side plane, and I'm going to make them even darker yellow. I accidentally had the wrong one selected here. I'll just make that white. I'll make sure I have the right piece selected, and I'll sample this yellow color. I'll turn off the grid with command or control quotation marks just so you can see those colors better. It looks like I missed one piece of trim right at the bottom of this floor. Let me just turn the grid back on and I'll trace out that piece. This one should match the other ones in the front plane. As one last step to this video, I want to stylize these lines. What I mean by that is I want to take the node tool and curve out these different shapes to give them a little bit of pz. To do that, I'll turn off the grid once again. Then I'll press V for the. I'll just select all of the layers that we've made, and I'm going to convert them all to curves. Then I'll just click off and we can select one layer at a time to bend all of these lines. To start, let's start with this roof line right here. I'm going to go to the center of this line and curve it inward. Then I'll go to the back here and I'll curve this inward, and I'll curve this line out. Right now, it's overlapping with this trim piece. I'll need to do that separately, and I'll bring this one out. Again, it's overlapping with the trim. Why don't we do the trim next? I'll select this front piece, and I'll bend this one. Make sure not to bend it too far where you can see the gap. Just bending it a little bit, and I'll bend this piece outward. Now we have the roof piece done, just a little bit stylized. Since we already bend this one a little bit, I'll bend this one as well. Then I'll go to this bottom piece and bend this one. I'll do the same on the other side just to keep it even. I'll bend this one inward a little bit. Then so we don't see this gap. I'm just going to move this node inward. It looks like this isn't lining up very well. It seems that this piece is overlapping a little. I'll just add a node to this point and drag it up to meet that corner. We have this line bending in. I do the same for this line. And this one and this one. Then I need to take this piece and bend it in. Now you can see we have this stylized roof that's curving inward. It looks pretty fun. Next, I'm going to come to this floor and I'll take its trim, and I'm just going to curve it and I'll take the main piece and curve this. For the rest of these pieces, I want them to balloon outward. I'll just take all of these lines and curve them out. If you run into any issues like this, just select those nodes and drag them so they meet. I might have gone a little bit overboard, but as you can see, our house has a lot more style now, a little bit more cartooning, and I think that's pretty fun. Now that we're done with that, we can see we have quite a few layers over here, and these layers will be a little hard to organize because the different furniture items and pieces that will add to this scene will overlap with the layers in some strange ways. I think I'll leave them as is without grouping. But I'll just take a moment to rename thee. All right, remember to press Command or Control S to save your work because that was a lot of work. And in the next video, we're going to move on to decorating the outside of the house with pretty details. 25. Outer House Details: In this video, we'll decorate the outside of the house. Now, there are two things I want to add to the outside. First, I want to add some lines going across this blue wall to represent the wood siding. Then I want to add some scallop details to this roof to act as the roof shingles. Let's start with the blue part. To add lines going across, I'm going to use the pen tool. I'm going to start my line outside. I'll hold shift to follow this line, and I am working in the side plane so that I can see that line. Then I'll lay down my other point. Then we have a decision to make. Before we duplicate this line all the way up the wall, we need to decide if we'd rather it be straight like this or curved like the rest of the house. I personally think it's fun to exaggerate these curves. I'll press A for the node tool, and then I'll drag this down. We have that nice curve now. I'll grab the move tool. Then I'll duplicate this by pressing command or control and shift, and I'll drag it up. Now that we've done it once, we can power duplicate with command or Control J until we have lines all the way up the wall. With those finished, I'm just going to hold shift to click the last line. I'll make sure these are nice and centered here. Then I'm going to make these lines a child layer to the blue wall. I think it would also look nice to make all of these lines more of a blue color like the wall. I'm going to sample the walls color and then make it slightly darker. Very nice. We have the wood siding done. Now we get to move on to the roof scallops. To make the roof scallops, I'm going to grab the pen tool. I'll click once right here. We're just on this last square of the roof. Go to the outside and click. Then go to the center of this square at the bottom and click and drag. Don't drag your handles too far out. Drag them so they stay inside the square. Then click on the top. We should have a nice U shape like this. I'm going to grab the node tool. I'll select these two top nodes, and then I'm going to make them lay down flat against the roof. I'm keeping it lined up with this top line here. Just making sure it's nice and lined up here. With that one finished, we can duplicate this across to repeat the pattern. I'll press V for the move tool, and then to duplicate it, I'll hold command or control and shift and I duplicate it across. I want this to line up like that. That looks really good. Now I can power duplicate with command or Control J. These all look so nice and lined up until we get to the very edge here. Here's how to fix that. First, grab the node tool. Then while holding shift, select all of the scallop layers. Then click and drag to select all of the nodes except for the first one. We want that to be a grounding anchor point. Then I'll take all of the rest of these and bring them in. Once that snaps to that line, you can see that all of these are still nice and even, and they fit perfectly in this roof. Now that we have this line, I'm going to group it. I'll press command or Control G. I want to continue this pattern going all the way up the roof. I'll press V for the move tool. Then I'm going to duplicate this upward by holding command or control and shift. I'm going to move it off to the side like this to create a brick pattern. It's a little bit offset. But we are missing one over here. I'm just going to double click on one and while holding command or Control and shift, I'll move it over. Making sure this lines up nice. Now we have these two groups here in our layers, and I can select both of them, and we can duplicate this set over and over all the way up our roof. Holding command or control, I'll move this one up, and while holding shift, I'll move it over, so it fits nicely. Very good. Then I'll press command or Control J to repeat. As I did that, it looks pretty good, but there are a few mistakes here. We have a gap here and a gap here. All we need to do to fix that is double click to select one, and then we can duplicate it with command or Control and Shift. Now that area will be nice and filled in, and I'll repeat that bringing one down here. With all of that finished, we can close up that group. I'll select all of these groups. I'm going to change the color to red for the stroke, but darker. Then I'm going to make this whole group of scallops, a child layer to our roof. You can see that snaps perfectly in place. Now that we have those two details done, I do want to add one more detail to the house. It's not technically on the outside of the house, but I just quickly want to add some lines onto the flooring to look like wooden floorboards. This is the exact same thing as we did on the side of the house. I'm just going to take the pen tool. I'll start a little bit outside of the floor. Then I'm going to switch to the front plane so I can follow this line, and I'll hold shift and click over here. Then I'm going to grab the node tool, and I'm just going to bend this so that it follows the bend of the flooring. Then I'm going to grab the move tool and we can duplicate this across the floor. Command or Control and shift. I think I'll make this a little bit wider than I made the siding. I'll just press command or Control J to repeat these across. I'll select all of those lines, and then I'll make sure they're nice and centered. We have about the same size floor boards on each side. That looks pretty good. I'm just going to sample the brown color, and I'll make it a little darker. Then I'm going to take all of these layers, and I'm going to bring them down to make them a child layer to the top floor. That looks really good. I actually want to duplicate this for the bottom floor. I'll hold command or control and shift, and I'll drag this down. Then I'm going to take these layers, remove them from that top floor group, and I'm going to make them a child layer to the bottom floor. I only have three lines here. I'm not sure where my other one went. There it is. Now we have four lines here. I just need to duplicate it one more time. I'll select one and duplicate it. Then I'm going to select all of these lines for the bottom floor and move them all down a bit. I'll turn off the grids. You can see all of our hard work. And with that, we're done with adding these details. Great job. I think all those details really took the doll house to the next level. In the next video, we're going to some light into the doll house by adding cute little windows. 26. Windows: Let's add some windows to our doll house. I want to add a couple windows to each side of our house. We'll just make one window to start and then we can duplicate it for the other areas. I'll just zoom in here and turn on the grid, and we can start by cutting a hole in the wall for our window. I'll grab the rectangle tool, and working in the side plane, I'll edit and plan. Then I'll click and drag out a window that's two squares by three squares. Then to cut this out. I'm just going to place this layer right on top of our blue wall layer and I'll select them both. Then we can use the subtract operation to remove this. Now we can see inside of the house, which is fun. With that done, we can begin to build out the frame of the window. Let's start by adding a top piece. I'll just line it up with one of the corners and click and drag to make a piece that looks like this. Before I continue, I'll just adjust the colors. I'll make the fill white and the stroke black. All right next, let's go to the front plane. I'll press escape, line it up and click and drag downward. Next, we can go ahead and make the front of the window. I'll switch to the side plane. I'll select all of those front pieces we just made, and I'll add them with the add operation. Then we can make the little cross pieces of the window. I'll make these a little bit skinnier. I think I need to move the to center. I'll do the same for this piece. Make sure that's centered. For those two pieces, I'll select them and add them together. All right. This looks really good. I'm just going to find all my layers in the layers panel and make sure they're all next to each other. Then to finish off the window, I'm going to add a piece of glass. I'll grab the rectangle tool and in the side plame. I'll just click and drag to add a rectangle here. I'll put it behind the cross pieces, and I'll lower the opacity of this. I think to around percent that way, it's still transparent, but it looks like there's a sheet of glass over this. With all that done, we can select all of these layers, group them together, and we can rename this window. Now we can duplicate this to the other areas of the house. I'll grab the move tool, with command or control and shift, I'll just raise this up. Then I'm going to switch to the front plane so we can follow this line across, and I'll hold command or control and shift to duplicate it onto this wall. I'll do the same for the bottom one. Making sure those are nice and lined up right under each other. This window needs to be below this floor layer. I'm just going to move this one down. To really make these look like windows, we also need to cut more holes into the walls. First, we'll start with the blue wall. I'll grab the rectangle tool, and I'll click and drag a rectangle whoops in the side flame to cover that space. Then I'll select that layer in the wall and use the subtract operation. Before you start cutting holes in the walls, make sure that you like where your windows are placed. Next, we'll do the yellow wall. I'll just hold shift to click both of those and use the subtract operation. Okay. Then I'll do this one. We cut holes for these windows, but it looks a little strange because we just have a plain white background. To fix this. I'm going to turn off edit en plane, and I'm going to click and drag to add a background color. I'll bring this underneath everything, even our swatches. Then I'm going to switch the fill color of this to pink. Now you can see that we're looking right through the windows at the background. But I think I'll make this a lighter color. Something like that. With that, we're done with the windows. Very nice. In the next video, we're going to start adding objects to the inside of the house, starting with the ladder. 27. Ladder: Video, we'll add a ladder to the scene. Before we start making the ladder, I just want to select our background color layer and I'll lock it in place just so we don't accidentally move it as we're working on this project. For our ladder, we're going to place it on the ground floor, and then it's going to come up at an angle to get to the second floor. To start, we're going to make two poles of the ladder that are going straight up and down, and then we'll tilt them after we make them. Let's start in the front plane, I'll edit in plane. Then I'll click and drag to make our first pole. I'll drag this to the very top of our layers. Then I'm going to make this a brown color. But I do want this to contrast with the flooring, so I'll make it a darker brown. Then I'll make this side of the pole. I'll make this side a little bit darker. Then we can make the top piece on the top plane. I'll make this the lightest brown. With that finished, I'll just select all of those layers and with the, I'll duplicate this. Then we can put this at the off angle. I'll select all of these layers and I'll convert them all to curves. Then I'll highlight all of the top nodes, and we can lean this over. I'll hold shift and lean it like that. Maybe a little less. With that placed, let's make the rungs of the ladder. Using the top plane, I'll grab the rectangle tool and I'll click and drag out one rng. This rung needs to be placed in front of this pole, but behind this one. Using the move tool, I'm just going to select all of those layers. I'll group them together. Then I'll place this group on top. Go back to the g. I'll just make sure this is placed within the bounds of this. That looks good. Now we can begin to duplicate this. With one done, I'll just power duplicate this all the way down. And we can double check that they're all lined up. I think that looks nice. To finish this, I'm going to make the front piece. But I can't just use the front plane like we normally would because it would go straight up and down, and this is at an angle. Instead, we'll use the pen tool. I'll just trace this piece manually. I'll hold shift to make sure that lines up there. Then I'm going to sample the front color and I'll apply it. With that finished, I'm just going to make sure all of the nodes line up nicely. Then we can duplicate this piece all the way down. With the move tool, I'll go ahead and start duplicating this down first. I'll make sure it's nice and lined up. Then we can power duplicate. To finish, I'm just going to group all of our later layers. Then I'm going to place them so that they're beneath the blue wall. I wanted this to be tucked behind the blue wall a little bit, but it looks like this piece needs to come behind the blue wall as well. I'll just select that piece, and I'll bring it down. There we go. And now we can adjust the ladder to place it however we'd like. I think that looks pretty good. All right, and with that, we're done. I think this ladder looks so nice. In the next video, we're going to make all of the furniture for the top floor of the doll house. 28. Upstairs Furniture: In this video, we'll make all of the upstairs furniture. That might sound a little intimidating, but this doll house is very simply furnished. We're just going to make a bed and a rug for the top floor. Let's start with the bed. I'll zoom in here, and I'll grab the rectangle tool to make the bed, we'll go into the top plane, edit and plane, and I'll click and drag out a shape like this. This is going to be for our mattress. For the fill, I'll actually select the light pink color from the outside of the house. Then we can make this three D. I'll go to the side plane. I'll press escape, line it up and drag it over. Then I'll go to the front plane and do the same for the other side. To make this look more like a soft mattress, I'm going to bend the edges, so I'll select all of our layers and I'll convert them to curves. Then I'll pull all of the edges out. Bending the edges can make a design look stylized and like a cartoon. But it's also really useful to make things look softer, like a nice soft bed, and by bending all of these edges, it looks like it's overstuffed. With that done, I'm just going to quickly change the colors. For this piece, I'll just make it slightly darker and I'll make the side piece the darkest. To raise this off the ground, let's make a few legs for the s bed. I'll grab the rectangle tool. Then I'll press escape. And starting right here on this corner, I'll just click and drag downward to make one leg. I'll switch to the side plane and press escape. I'll line it up and make the other leg. For these legs, I'm actually going to make them the yellow color. I'll make them both yellow, but I'll make the left side a little bit darker. Then I'll select both of these legs, I'll group them, and I'll move them underneath the mattress. Then using the move tool. I can duplicate these across to the other areas. Another thing I want to add is a little round headboard. I'll grab the ellipse tool. I'll start on one of the edges. But I need to make sure I'm working in the proper plane, so I'll switch to the front plane. Then while holding shift, I'll click and drag until we hit the other side like this. Then using the, I'll hold shift and drag this down so that this lines up perfectly with each edge. I'm going to convert this shape to curves. Then I'll grab this top node and holding shift. I'll drag it up just to make this headboard a little bit taller. I'll make it the same color as this plane of the legs. To finish off the bed, we'll just give it a pillow and a blanket. Starting with the pillow, I'll grab the rectangle tool, and we'll edit in the top plane to start. I'll just click and drag a rectangle like this, and I'll raise this above everything. Now, this one, I'm going to make the dark pink color that we have in our swatches. Then I'm going to convert this shape to curves, and we're going to make this pillow a bit rounder. I'll just select all of the nodes, and then I'm going to convert them up here into smooth nodes. With that looking smoother now, we can duplicate this shape and move it to make it look three D. Using the move f, I'll just click and drag. Then I'll press P for the Pen tool so that we can connect the sides. That all looks good. I'll make this that same pink color. I'll bring it down, and then I'll combine it with a lower layer. I'll make this lower layer a bit darker. Now you can see what that looks like. This pillow looks a little bit too large, I think, so I'll just select both of those layers and decrease the size with the move. That's better. Last, we're going to add a blanket to the bed using the Pen tool. I'm going to line it up on the edge. I'll line it up with this edge again and I'll click and drag. Then I'll hold Alt or Option so that I can bring this down sharply toward the bottom. Then I think I'll bring it off of the bed a little bit like this. I'll bring it around. I'll line it up with the edge. Then I'll hold Alt or Option to break the curve. I'll line it up with this edge. I'll click and drag. Then Alt or option to break the curve again, and I'll finish this. This, I'm also going to make that pink color. Now we can go ahead and adjust these nodes using the node tool. We're done with the bed now. I'll just select all of the bed layers and group them. Then we can go ahead and finish off this video by adding a comfy rug under the bed. To do this, I'll go to our shape tools, and I'm going to use the Cloud tool. Let's work in the top plane. I'm just going to click and drag while holding command or control and shift. I'll move this under the bed, and I'll make this a lighter pink. We need to rearrange the layers a little bit so they don't overlap with the roof, and we might also make them a little bit smaller. We're done. Just like that, the top floor is fully furnished. We just have a few more videos, and this project will be complete. In the next one, we're going to add furniture to the downstairs. Oh. 29. Downstairs Furniture: Let's furnish the downstairs floor of the doll house. This will be pretty simple. We're just going to make a table, a couple of stools, and a vase with a flower in it. Let's start with the table. I'll grab the ellipse tool and we'll edit in the top plane. Then I'll hold shift to click and drag. I'm going to make this tabletop match the floor. Then I'm going to make this tabletop three D, so I'll grab the move tool and then I'll duplicate it downwards. I'll just lower this layer so that it's underneath the top one. Then using the pen tool, I'll just connect the sides. I'll make it that same brown color. Then I'll add the two bottom pieces together into one piece. Then I'll make this a darker color. I think I made the table a little too thick. I'm going to grab the node tool and I'll select all of these bottom nodes. Then using the arrow keys on my keyboard, I'll just move it upward. Okay Let's place this tabletop onto a pole and then a little base. First, the pole, I'll grab the rectangle tool and I'll turn off tit in plane. Then going into the very center, I'll hold command or control and shift. I'll just make a little square like that. Then I'll drag it down and I'll place it under the layers. I want this to be on the bottom. I'll convert this to curves. Then I'll go to the center bottom and I'll just pull downward to make it curved. Now we can make a circular base, which is the exact same process as the top of the table. I'll des grabe the ellipse tool and edit in plan, and then I can go ahead and start this. I just repeated the process and I made the bottom a slightly darker color. Now we can select all of these layers and group them together with command or Control G. I'll just rename this group table. Let's just adjust the placement of this table. It needs to be behind the. I'll bring this down and place it right there. Now that we have our table all finished, Let's make the stools. In my mind, I'm picturing little round stools that match the table. Let's do that. I'll select the table layer so that these stools go above that layer. Then I'll grab the ellipse tool and I'll edit in the top plane to make the seats of the stools. I'll just hold shift to click and drag. Then I'm going to make the top of the stool a blue color. Then we can go ahead and make this three D. I'll duplicate the top and then using the pen tool, I'll connect the sides. I'll adjust the nodes. And I'll add those two bottom areas together, and I'll make the color slightly darker. The s is done. Now it's time to make the legs. I'm going to make this stool sit on four legs. I'll grab the rectangle tool and I'll edit in the front plane first. Then I'll click and drag to add one leg. To make sure that the other part of the leg is the exact same width. I'm actually going to duplicate this with command or Control J. Then I'll flip it horizontal using this operation. Then using the move tool, I can line them up. I could have used this strategy up here with these legs because I think this side is bigger than the other one. This is just a way to fix that problem. The bed legs aren't bothering me too much though, so I'll leave them as is. With these two legs done, I'll select them both and make them yellow. But I'll make the left one a slightly darker yellow. And I'll place both of these underneath the cushion of the top. Now we can go ahead and adjust the placement of the legs and duplicate them. I'll hold command or control and shift to bring it to this side. I'll make sure it's nice and lined up here. And I'll duplicate it again for this side. The fourth leg would be covered by this front leg, so I'll leave that alone. Now I'll just group all of these stool layers together, and I'll rename this stool. Now I can duplicate this stool around the table. One last detail for this bottom floor. I'm going to make a vase with a flower in it. Let's start with the vase. I'm actually going to turn the grid back on, and I'll work in the top plane. I'm going to find a cross section, and we're going to work on the grid with that cross section just to keep this shape lined up as we work on it. First, I'm going to grab the ellipse tool. Then I'm going to turn off it and plane and I'll line this up with the very center of the grid. I'll hold command or control and shift to make a perfect circle. I'll make the shape white. Then I'm going to make some adjustments to make this look like the bottom of a vase. First, I'm going to convert this to curves. Then I'm going to add a node on either side of this bottom node right here. Then I'll select this bottom node, and using the arrow keys, I'm just going to move it up one. That way, this looks a little bit more flat. Then I'll select all of these nodes and I'll bring them all up. Then I'll make the neck of the vase and I'll use a rectangle to do that. I'll hold command or control. That weight stays nice and centered. Then I'll bring this up here. To make this slightly wider, I'll use the move tool, and then I'll hold command or control and I'll just make that wider. I'll add these two together. Now we have this nice vase shape, but I'd like to make an opening up here for the flower. I'm going to grab the ellipse tool, and I'll just press escape, and then I'll click and drag to make a flat circle like that. I'll make this flat circle a slightly darker color. Just add a little contrast. Then to prep adding our flower into this, I need to arrange the layers a little bit. First, I need to place this with the e wherever that vase layer went. There it is. Here's the problem. If I place the stem of my flower so that it's going into the vase, I would like the vase to be on top and the stem to be going into the round section. But you can see that if the round section is underneath the vase, we can't see it. To get around this little issue, I'm going to duplicate this top circle. Then I'll take the duplicated top circle, I'll select the vase, and then I'll use the subtract operation. Now you can see we've transformed the vase to have this opening, which means that if I arrange these layers, now the stem can look natural in this vase. Just like that. We need to place a flower in between these two layers. To start, I'll just delete this rectangle placeholder and we'll make a nice stem. I'll grab the pen tool, I'll click, and then I'll click and drag inside the vase. I'll hold Alt or Option while I'm still clicking and dragging to break the curve. Then I'll click and I'll click up here. Like that. I'll hold Alt or Option while I'm still clicking and dragging, and I'll finish that. We do have a green color up here in our swatches that all apply to the stem. Now for the fun part, we're going to make the flower, and I'm going to go to our shape tools and use the double star tool for this. I'll click and drag while holding shift. Then we're going to make some adjustments to make this look more like a flower. First, I'm going to arrange the orange handles. I'll pull this one out so that it matches the other flower petals. Then I'll move this one in just a little bit. Then to make these look more like petals, I'm going to convert this shape to curves. Then I'm going to hold shift to select all of these outer nodes, and I'm going to make them smooth nodes, so they look more rounded. Then with those nodes still selected, I can pull on them to adjust the angle of our flower. I'll adjust it a little bit to the side like this. And a couple of last steps for the flower. I'm going to make it pink. Then using the ellipse tool, I'll add a little center to the flower. I'll hold command or control and shift to make a perfect little circle. Then I'll make the center of the flower yellow. With that done, we can go ahead and group the flower and the vase altogether. To make this flower look a little more natural just before I finish, I'll select all of the layers and I'll go to the stroke panel to decrease the stroke. I'll make it to pixels like this. I think that just makes more sense and you can see more of the detail of the flower now. Okay, Beau. The house is now furnished and mo finished. In the next video, we're going to add a little more detail to the front yard of the house. 30. Outdoor Objects: This video will add a few objects to the outside of the doll house. I want to keep things nice and simple. We're just going to make a little flower box and a mailbox in this video. Let's start with the mailbox. I'm going to begin in the side plane, edit and plane. Then I'm going to make a rectangle. Then I want to make this a mailbox shape, which usually has curved corners at the top. To do this, I'm going to try a different technique. I'll grab the ellipse tool. I'll press escape. Then I'm going to click and drag while holding shift until I get to the other side. This should line up with both sides. I'll drag this to the top of our rectangle here. Then I'm going to select both of these layers, and I'm going to use the divide operation. That's the last one right here. Wherever our shapes intersect, now they all become individual pieces. Now I can select the two corners that I don't want and I'll delete them. Then I'll take these two shapes, and I'll add them together. Now we have that classic mailbox shape. I'm going to make our mailbox blue. Then we can work on making this three D. Using the move tool. I'm going to duplicate this piece back. Then I'll connect the two pieces using the Pen tool. This is such an odd shape that I had a little trouble knowing where to place the node right up here. But I think this will connect it nicely. I'll just arrange my layers and I'll select the bottom two and add them together. Before we move on, I want to adjust the stroke width. We lowered the stroke width for the flower in the last video. I'm just going to select both of these layers, and I'll go to the stroke panel, and I'll raise this back to three so that this matches the rest of our design. Now we can go ahead and add some details to make this look like a mailbox. I'll select the and I'll make this a darker blue. Then I'll select the rectangle tool. I'm just going to add a little rectangle to the front here. I'll make this even darker. I'll add a small little rectangle to the top here. This is the latch that's holding it closed. I'm going to make this red. Then I'll make the arm of the mailbox. But I need to change planes, so I'll undo that and switch to the front plane. Now I can make the arm of the mailbox. I'll add these two shapes together. Last for the mailbox, I'm going to put it on a little pole to hold it up. Using the rectangle tool, I'll turn off edit in plane, and I'll just click and drag a rectangle like this. I'll make this yellow. And then I'll convert this to curves and I'll drag down the bottom to make it look like a rounded pole. All right. And with that, we're done with a mailbox. Go ahead and adjust the sizes and placements however you like. I'll just group all of these layers together and I'll rename this. Let's make a flower box next. I'll start in the top plane. I'll use the rectangle tool and edit in plane, and then we can drag out a shape for the bottom of the box. I'm going to make this brown, but I'm going to lighten it quite a bit. Now that we have the base of our box, we can build up all of the sides. I'll just quickly do that. With that done, I'll just select both of the side plane pieces, and I'll make them the darkest brown. Then I'll do the two front plane pieces, and I'll make them slightly darker somewhere in between the lightest color and the darkest. With those done, I'm going to make the top frame to make all of these shapes look three D. I'll select all of those pieces and add them together, and I'll make them the lightest color. For our next step, I'm going to fill the flower box with dirt and to make this look very organic and bumpy. I'm just going to use the pen tool. I'll line it up with one side to start. Then I'll come over here and click. I'll click over here. We have this edge all nicely placed. Then I can click and drag to make some lumps and bumps of the dirt pile. Using the node tool, I'm just going to make sure all of these line up nicely. Perfect. Now I'm just going to fill this with a nice dark brown color. To make this flower box look even cuter. I'm going to curve the sides of all of the brown outer box shapes. I'm going to select all of those. I'll grab the move tool and convert them all to curves. Then I'm just going to bend all of the sides to mimic the cartoony style of the house. I'm pulling them mainly to make them look like they're ballooning. To finish this flower box, we're going to add some flowers to it and to cheat a little bit, we're actually just going to use the flower that we already made and duplicate it a bunch of times. I'll click on this to find its layer and the layer stack. Then I'll select all of those flower layers, which is pretty much everything except for the vase. Then using the move tool. I'm just going to duplicate this by holding command or control, and I'll click and drag to bring it over. I'll select all of those layers and bring them to the very top and I'll also group them together just so we can keep things straight here. Now we can go ahead and duplicate this over and over again by holding down command or control and clicking and dragging. Now that we have those flowers, I'm going to make some of them have red petals instead of pink. Just to add some variety here. I'll just open up their group. I'll select the pink part. Then I'll make it red. I'm also going to flip some of these horizontally, just to add some variety. Once you like how all of these are placed, the last thing we need to do is we need to trim the stems of these ones that are overlapping with the edge of our box. An easy way to do this is to select the layer we need to trim and then grab the knife tool Then you can just click and drag to cut that piece. Now over here in the layers, you can see we have two pieces of our stem and we can delete the bottom one. If you wanted to, you could also use the node tool to add two nodes to the stem where you want to break it and then delete the very bottom nodes. That's just another strategy, but I wanted to show you that the knife tool is pretty easy to use. With all of that finished, I'm just going to group all of our garden box layers and I'll rename them. All right, great work. We just have one more quick video, and then we're finished with the doll house. We'll take some time in the next video to add some shadows and do any finishing touches. 31. Shadows: Add some shadows to finish off this project. This is just a quick finishing touches type of video. We honestly could be done at this point, but I think it's always nice to add a little bit of shading to help round out the design. To start, we're going to add a few shadows to the inside of the house using the pen tool. I'll click on the bed layer, and then I'll click on the layer beneath it. That way, the shadow is placed right underneath the bed layer. I'll press P for the Pen tool, and then I'll trace out a rough circle going off to the left of the bed. I'm going to switch these two colors, so we have a black fill and no stroke. Then I'll press one on my keyboard to give it 10% opacity. You can see because we selected the ladder layer. This has been placed perfectly under the bed. But if your shadow is overlapping with the ladder, it's not going to look very good. You could also place this under the ladder. To create a shadow under the rug, I'm going to select the rug layer. And Then I'll hold command or control and shift to duplicate it and move it over to the side. This duplicate copy should be placed underneath. It should have a black fill and no stroke and 10% opacity. Then we can go ahead and adjust the placement. I'll use the arrow keys to move it slightly diagonally, something like that. Now you can see we have a nice shadow going under the rug as well. I'm going to continue this process, adding some shadows under the stools and the table. But this time, I'll just use the ellipse tool since these are a round shapes. To add a shadow under the ladder, I'll use the pen tool again. I'll line it up on one corner. Then while holding shift, I'll click to add a diagonal line like this. I'll bring this down and click click, click. We have this diagonal shadow. I'll make this have a black fill and 10% opacity. We can also add some shadows outside. I'll do a rough trace going around this flower box. And under the mailbox, I'll use the ellipse tool. Last, I'll add one shadow to this side of the house. With that done, we can select all of the layers and move them so that our design is more centered, and we can also turn off the Swatches group. Great work. You finished the Dollhouse project. I know that was a really big one, and I hope you learned some great techniques that you can use on your own projects. In the next chapter, we'll do our next project as we create a scene that was inspired by video games. 32. Game Platforms Project: This chapter we'll create a fun video game inspired design. We'll create a scene with game platforms and a lot of other fun little details that will make you want to jump in and play in the scene. Let's get started. 33. Platform Framing: Let's begin our platform project by making the basic frames. Before we start, I'll show you the sketch that I made just so you know the direction we're going in. There are three platforms with different themes. The first is a grassy blue sky area, and then we go up the stairs into an outer space area, and then we slide down the slide to the underwater area. In this video, we'll build the basic platforms since they're all the same shape and size. Back in designer, I have an exercise file for you with all of the colors that we'll use. Next, we can go ahead and set up our grid. This time, I want the grid to be a little more flat. We're actually going to use the cube settings this time. I'll turn on show grid. Then I'll change these settings. I'll change it so that the O is set to 45 and the E is set to 25. Then I'll go up here and type eight for the divisions, and we can see them as we zoom in. I'll just close out of this. Now because we altered the settings of the cube. The grid lines won't line up perfectly, but that's okay because this design doesn't need to be perfectly straight and lined up. It's a little more free form and we'll use the grid as a guide. With that, let's make the platforms. I'll grab the rectangle tool, and then I'll edit in the top plane to make our first platform. I'll line it up on one of the corners and I'll begin to drag outward. I'm going to make this 14 squares by six squares. I'm going to select the green color and apply it. Then I'm going to have every shape have a black stroke that has a width of three pixels. Now that we have that first piece done. We can go ahead and make our back piece. This time we'll edit in the front plane. You can see how this doesn't line up perfectly with the grid. I just need to make sure that my back piece lines up perfectly with this corner. I'll press escape. I'll make sure I'm nice and lined up there. Then I'll click and drag until I'm lined up with this other side. Just double checking that. That looks good. Now we can drag this upward. I'm going to change the fill color of this one to the blue color. Then we can go ahead and start making these shapes three D. Still working in the front plane, I'll just line it up right here and I'll click and drag to add a piece here. Just making sure all of these line up perfectly with the corners of our shape, not necessarily the grid. Then I'm going to make this the same green color. I'll switch to the side plane and do this other side here. This time, I'm going to stretch this past just a little bit. Then I'm going to make a piece going this direction. I'll press escape, I'll line it up and drag upward. This piece will be the blue color. Then we can make a top piece to finish off this top part. We made all of the colors the same just to keep things straight. But now we can go ahead and decide which colors we want to be lighter or darker depending on the light. Now, to keep things simple, I think we're just going to keep the lighting the same as we've done with the top being the brightest and the left side being the dest. With a top pie selected, I'll just make this lighter, and I'll do the same for this top piece. Then I'll select the left pieces, so this one right here, I'll make this darker, and I'll make this side piece right here darker. Now we can go ahead and finish off the platform by stylizing it. I'm going to hold shift to select all of our layers and all convert them to curves. Now we can bend all of these pieces to add some style. This time as I'm bending the pieces, I'm paying attention to the line that's directly across from the piece I'm bending, and I'm bending both of those pieces in the same direction. You can see that for the top of the grass, we bent the top part down, and then we bent the bottom part down so that they're looking like they're flowing together, bending downwards. Now that we're done with that, I'm just going to group all of these layers. Then we can duplicate these for the other platforms. I'm going to arrange them something like this with a little bit of overlap here for the slide, I want this one to be low enough that it makes sense to add some stairs. I'm going to turn off the grid. Then as one last step for this prep video, I'm going to recolor these other two platforms just so that we can keep them straight. For the space platform, I'm using this bluey purple color and we're going to make the whole thing that color. Then I'm just going to change the shades to match so we have a darker left side and a brighter top plane. Then for the underwater layer, I'm going to make it so that the back piece is blue like water, and the bottom piece is yellow like sand. Then I'll just rearrange those colors to make them darker on the left and brighter on the top. All right. And with all of that done, I'll just rename these layers. All right, we're finished setting up the base of the design. Great job. In the next video. We're going to focus on the design for the first platform, the grassy platform. 34. Grassy Platform: Let's design the grassy platform in this video. To start. Let's work on this grass here. I want to add a layer of dirt underneath the grass. To do that, I'm going to grab the pen tool, I'm just going to start on the outside here to click a point. I'll bring it over here and click another point. Then I'll click and drag to make a curved line like this. Then I'll just bring it around. I'm going to make this yellowish orangish color right here. I'll apply that. Then I'm going to make it a child layer to this piece. All right. And now using the node tool, I can adjust these points. Now we can repeat the same process on the other side to continue the dirt around. Just remember to make that piece a slightly darker shade of this orangish yellow color. The left side should always be darker. The next refinement I want to make to this grass is I want to add some grassy tufts to make this look more like there's grass, not just a flat green piece of ground. To do that, I'm going to grab the node, and I'm going to select this piece right here. Then I'm going to use the node tool to add nodes to create little spikes on the edge here. I'll click and this will be our grounding node so that this line can stay nice and flat as it is. I'll add another grounding node right over here. This will stay nice and flat. Now this middle area, we can use to click and add little tufts of grass like this. Now, to make this look like spiky grass, I'm going to move the handles like this, so they're facing up. Then I'll hold Alt or Option, and I'll click and drag to turn this into a sharp node. I'm going to repeat this. I'll add another grounding node to complete this tuft. Then I'll click again to add a node and bring another one up. I'll bend the handles, I'll hold Alt or option, and then I'll bend this down to make it spiky. I'll add another grounding node. And then one last time, I'll add a node to the center here, and I'll drag this up. I'll bend the handles. There we go, and then I'll hold alt or option to break this and make it sharp. Now you can see we have this cute little tuft of grass to emphasize that this is supposed to be grass, and we can adjust these nodes however we'd like. I'm going to repeat these same steps over here on this side. I like how these tufts of grass look, but it's a little annoying to add nodes like this. To add a few more tufts of grass to this back area. I'm actually just going to use the Pen tool to manually draw that squiggle in. I'll press P for the Pen tool. Then I'll click once to start. I'll click and drag to make a slight curve. Then while I'm still clicking and dragging, I'll hold Alt or Option to make a sharp node. Then I'll bring it down like this and we can begin that again, click and drag, Alt or Option, and click. I'm not going to close the curve. Instead, I'll leave it nice and open like this and I'll press escape. Then I'm going to change the fill of this curve to this light green color. Then using the node tool, we can make any adjustments we'd like to this. Now that we've added those details to the grass. Next, let's add some detail to the background of this platform. This background will be in two D as if all of these details are painted on the surface. This should be pretty simple. We'll start with the pen tool, and I'm just going to add a few little hills back here. I'll press Escape to make sure no nodes are selected. Then I can begin. I'll click and drag, and then I'll click once to make a sharp node. I'll click and drag again. Click once, and we'll do that one last time. I'll bring it around. We're going to make this the medium green color of right here. Then I'm going to make this a child layer to the sky. These grass tubs should also be in the group, so I'll just move those down. Then we can select these hills and we can move them and adjust them however we'd like. As one last detail to this sky, I'm going to draw a few clouds. I'll press P for the Pen tool. Then I'm just going to click and drag to draw a little cloud shape. I'll fill this with white. Then I'll do this one more time. Remember, you can always use the no tool to adjust your shapes. It can be hard to get it right the first time with the Pen tool. I'll just use the tool to adjust how these are placed. The next thing I want to add is a tree. I'm going to add a tree to this corner right here. To start, we'll make the trunk. To make the trunk look circular. I'm going to grab the ellipse tool and work with the top plane, edit in plane, and I'll hold shift to drag out a perfect circle. I'll place this, so it's on top, but still in the group. This base represents how thick the bottom of our trunk will be. Feel free to make this a little bit larger. Then we're going to duplicate this and move it upward. I'll just make this a little bit smaller by holding command or control and shift to click and drag like this. This circle will be our guide as we create the cylinder trunk shape. With that setup, I'll press P for the Pen tool. Then I'm going to start by lining this up in the center. I'll line it up in the center of this top one. Then I'll bring it out to the side, and I'll bring this one to the side and I'll click and drag to make this a nice trunk shape. I'll hold alt or option as I'm clicking and dragging, and then I'll connect the piece. Just to keep the colors consistent, I'll switch this to white, even though we'll change all the colors later. I'm going to duplicate this shape with command or control J. Then I'll press V for the move tool. I'll flip this horizontal and while holding shift, I'll move it over and line it up like this. I'll select all of these white shapes we just made, and I'm going to add them together with the add operation. Then I'm going to make this a brown color. I'll actually sample this brownish color right here, and then I'll make it darker. We have our trunk. Next, we're going to make the fluffy leaves and to do this, we're going to use the Cloud tool. I'm going to turn off it in plane so that I can just click and drag while holding shift to make a perfect cloud. I want this cloud to only have six bubbles. I'll edit that up here. Just to make it a more simple shape. I'll also flatten it just a little bit. Then I'm going to make this green. But because I don't want it to blend in with the background, I'm going to make it a darker green. To add just a little more detail to these leaves, I'm actually going to duplicate this shape with command or Control J. Then using the move tool, I'm going to make this a bit smaller while holding shift and command or control. Then I'll just move it upward, and I'll make this one slightly lighter. Now we have our beautiful tree, and just to finish this off, I'm going to add a little tuft of grass right here. I think I'll just duplicate one of the tufts of grass that we've already made. I'll hold command or control, and I'll drag that over, and then I'll place this above the tree. I think the tree looks a little too large. I'm just going to select all of the tree layers. Then I'll grab the move tool and I'll adjust them while holding shift. We're almost done. I just have a couple of more objects that I want to add here, and they are mystery blocks. In video games, mystery blocks are little blocks that your character can jump up and hit and sometimes a prize or an object will come out of them. It's all a mystery. To make these mystery blocks, I'll just make sure we're working in our group here. Then I'm going to grab the rectangle tool and edit in plan to make a few blocks. I'll hold shift to click and drag to make our first top of our cube. I'm going to make this this yellow color right down here. Then I'll finish making the cube by using the side plane and the front plane. Once we have our cube drawn out, we can adjust the colors. Then I'll select all of these layers and I'll convert them to curves just so we can make this cube look a little bit puffy. I'm going to drag every edge. And to finish this design off. I'm just going to add a little question mark to this cube. I'll use the artistic text tool and I'm going to edit in the front plane, and I'll click and drag to drag out a letter like this. Then I'll just type in the question mark. I'll drag this above everything, so we can see that. Then I'll highlight it and I'll change the font. I like this aerial rounded font for this to make it look soft and playful. All right with that good. We'll grab the move tool and adjust its position. Now we have our first mystery block done, so I'll just group all of those layers. I'll also group all of the tree layers to keep those straight in the group. Now we have our first mystery block, we can place this wherever we'd like. I'll place it right here. Then I'll duplicate this while holding command or control, and I'll bring this up. For this other block, I'm going to double click. Then I'm going to change this to an exclamation mark. Then using the move tool, I'll just make sure this is nice and centered. With that, all of the objects for our grassy platform are finished so we can go ahead and adjust the placement to make sure everything fits nicely. Great job. We're done with this video. That was like a mini project all on its own. In the next video, we're going to connect this platform with the next one by building a simple set of stairs. 35. Stairs: This video we'll make a set of stairs to connect two of the platforms. To make the stairs, we'll start by making one step and then we'll duplicate it over and over to make a set of stairs. Let's start editing in the top plane. I'll grab the rectangle tool, and I'm going to click and drag a rectangle that has the same width as half of one of these big squares. Then for the length, I'm just going to drag it out a little bit more than one square. This doesn't have to be exact, but I just wanted to share my measurements. Once you have that, you can go ahead and line it up to the edge of this top platform here. I'm going to make this red, so I'll need to sample that color swatch. Since this is the top plane, I'll just make this a lighter color. With that done, we can make the front of the step here. I'll switch to the side plane and press escape. Before I connect it up here, I'm going to make this so that it's half the width of one big square plus a little bit more, and then I'll line it up with this step. Once you have that aligned, we can go ahead and make it the red color but darker this time. Then I'll hold shift to select both of these layers and using the move tool. I'll just duplicate this over and over. I'll hold command or control and shift, and I'll drag it straight downward until those two lines line up. We have the bottom of the step and the top of the step perfectly aligned. Then I'll hold shift and I'll drag it over. Until it aligns on the corners. I'll just repeat this all the way down. We have the top steps. Now we'll just make the side of this staircase, and I'll use the pen tool to do that. I'll line it up on this corner right here. I'll click. Then I'll line it up on this corner and I'll click and drag like this. Then while I'm clicking and dragging still, I'll hold Alt or Option just to bring it up like this so that I can bring it around. I'll make this the red color. Then I'll place this underneath all of our stairs. With that, we have the basic shapes of our stairs. I'm going to group all of these layers. I'll grab the move tool. While holding shift, I'm just going to push it over just a little bit so that it's not overlapping with the grass right here. Now that we have the stairs done, I just want to stylize them to match the surroundings better. I'm going to select all of our rectangles and I'll convert them all to curves. Then I'm just going to bend them all so they match the curve of the purple platform. It's bending downward. I'm just going to do that with each of these steps. I think that looks a little cuter. Now to finish off the stairs, I'm going to add a tuft of grass on the side, just to help it to blend in with the grassy platform. I'll press P for the Pen tool. Then I'm just going to add a little tuft of grass right here. I'll click, click and drag, hold Alt or Option. Then I'll add another point. I'll repeat that and repeat that one last time. I'm going to fill this with the light grass color. And I'm going to make sure that this is in the stairs group. Perfect. I like this tuft of grass where it is, but I think this one being right next to it looks a little funny. I'm going to grab the node tool and I'm going to select these nodes. I'll just move them all over. Okay, that looks better to me. And with that, now we have a way to climb up from the grassy platform up to the outer space one. So with that finished, in the next video, we'll work on the outer space platform. 36. Outer Space Platform: Let's add details to the outer space platform. This platform will actually be our easiest platform. This should be pretty quick to put together. Let's start by adding some flat decorations to the back and to the top. I'm going to start in the top plane to start, I'm going to make a little planet, so I'll grab the ellipse tool, and then I'll click and drag while holding shift to make a planet. I'm going to make this this color down here. Then I'm going to turn this into Saturn. We'll give it some rings going around it. I'll click and drag to add an oval like this. Then using the move tool, I'll just make sure this is nice and centered. Then I'm going to cut out a piece of this flat oval to create that ring shape. Again, I'll take the ellipse tool. Then I'll press escape and I'll line it up with this side, and I'll click and drag till we hit the other side. I'll just line this up, so it's a right on that edge. With that looking good, I'm going to cut this out from the bottom oval. I'll use the subtract operation, and now we have that beautiful Saturn's ring shape, and I'm going to make these red. With that done, I'll just group these layers. I'll add them to the outer space group, and then I'll rotate them around. Another detail I want to add throughout this top piece and this side piece is I want to have little stars going throughout it. I'm going to grab this star tool. Then I'll hold shift to make a perfect little star. I'm going to make this star, this new yellow color right here. Then I can grab the move tool and just duplicate this by holding command or control to add these little stars in. I think the stroke looks a little too big, so I'll select all of them. I'm just going to decrease the stroke size so that we can see that these are stars better. I think two looks pretty good. I also want some stars on this plane, so I'll switch to the front plane. I'll select the star tool. Then I'll click and drag while holding shift to make a perfect star. Then using the move tool, I can duplicate this around. That's looking good. Now I want to add a planet to this part. I'll grab the ellipse tool and I'll hold shift to click and drag a planet. Then I'm going to go to the stroke panel and put it back to three just so this matches the rest of our design. I'm going to make this planet the green color here. Then I'm going to add some stripes to it. I'll press P for the Pen tool, and then I'll click and click. I'll hold Alt or Option. I'll click again, and I'll click and drag here. We have a nice big stripe like that. It's going across the outside, and I'm going to make this this blue color. I'll make this a child layer to the planet. Then I think I'm going to use the node tool to make this a skinnier stripe. I'll select the two bottom nodes and just bring them up with the arrow keys on my keyboard. And now, I'll select the move tool and I'll duplicate this down. Now the backgrounds are all finished. The next thing I want to add is I want to make a few star platforms. The idea behind these star platforms is that they're like floating stepping stones that you can hop across. We'll make one star platform right here and then we'll duplicate it across. I'm going to use the star tool and I'll go to the top plane. I'll hold shift to drag out a star. I'll make this the same yellow color as the other stars. I'll get the move tool out so that we can duplicate this. Then I'm going to raise this up. Now to make this three D, I'll get the Pen tool out so that we can connect these points. Once you have all of the corners connected, we can change the color to yellow. I'll drag this underneath, and I'll combine it with a lower shape. I think this looks pretty good as a three D star, but I do think it's a little strange that there's no line right here or on these corners. Using the pen tool, I'm actually going to add a brand new line right there, then I'll press escape. I'll do that for here. I'll press escape, and I'll do that for here, and I'll press Escape. I'm going to group all of these star platform layers together. Now we can go ahead and duplicate these across. But before I do, I'm going to make the top of the star a slightly lighter color. Okay. Now it's ready to be duplicated. I'll grab the move tool. Then I'll duplicate these across. As one last detail, I think it'd be fun to have another mystery block on this platform. Maybe up here so that you have to hop on these platforms to get to it. I'm going to select this mystery block by double clicking, I'll hold command or control to duplicate it. Then I'm going to drag this so that it becomes a part of the outer space group. Now I'll just make a few final adjustments to the placement of all of these stars. Now that I'm looking at this design, I think there's just too much of this yellow color because we have so many stars. I'm going to take all of these small stars, and I'm actually going to fill them with white. I like that better, just a little bit of color contrast. With that, we're done. In the next video, we're going to add a super simple object as we make a slide that connects the outer space platform with the underwater platform. 37. Slide: Let's make a slide so that we can go from outer space to under the sea. This is going to be a very short, simple video. To make the slide. I'm just going to use the Pen tool, and I'm going to start by making a squared off shape right up here at the top. I'll click and drag and then hold Alt or option to make that squared off shape. Then I'll come down here where I'll click and drag outward to make a curve. I'll hold Alt or option again. I'll change directions, and then I'll connect it back up here. We can use the node tool to adjust these points. I think this is a pretty good start. I'm going to place this underneath the outer space layer. Then I'm going to fill this with red. This is the back of the slide. But I'd like to make a little portion that sticks out right here to show that the slide is three D. I'll use the Pen tool again. I'll just add a point right here. I'll bring it around. This can go underneath our slide layer, and since it's facing the top plane, we'll make this the lighter red color. In fact, we should probably make the whole slide a darker shade of red, since it's facing the darkest plane direction. I'm going to sample this darker red that we had created, and I'll apply that. Okay, I'll just group these layers. I'll rename them. And we're done. Very simple video. Great job. Now that we finish the slide in the next video, we can go ahead and get started on our last platform, the Underwater platform. 38. Underwater Platform: In this video, we'll add all of the beautiful details to the underwater platform. To start, I want to add some detail to the sand to make it look more like mounds of sand. To do that, I'm going to grab the node tool. Then I'm going to select these layers and add little bumps to them. Starting right here, I'll add a node, and then I'll adjust the handles. Now you can see we have this nice subtle bump over here. I'm going to do this for the other sides as well. With that added wavings to the lines. I just think this looks a lot more like sand. Another thing we can do to add detail to this area is we can create a layered look with this sand on top and then a darker layer of sand underneath, similar to how we did the grassy platform. I'm going to do the exact same technique. I'll grab the pen tool, and I'll just trace a nice little curved line right here. I'll bring it around. Then I'm going to fill it with a color that's a little bit darker. And I'll make this a child layer to that layer. Now you can see what that looks like. I'll press escape, and then we can go ahead and start again on this side. I'm going to sample the color that we did for this side, but I'll make it a little bit darker. I'll make this a child layer to the proper side. That looks so good. I can really see the sand now. Next, let's fix up this background area. To start, I'm going to add a water line at the very top of it. I'll grab the pen tool. Then I'll line it up with the edge and click. Then I'll click and drag over here. I'll hold Alt or Option to adjust the angle. And then I'll repeat that. I'll click up to create a little wave, Alt or Option to bring it down and I'll repeat. You can't really see it behind here, so I'll just stop it there. I'm going to bring this up and around. I'm going to fill this with this blue sky color. Then I'm going to make it a child layer to the back wall. Now you can see the vision. We have the blue water and this lighter blue sky. Because we've changed this color, I'm also going to make this top piece the same color as the sky piece over here. I'll just sample that color. To continue adding detail to this background. I'm just going to go over here. I'll select this child layer, and I'll continue to add more child layers onto this. Using the pen tool, I'm going to make some rocks for the background here. And I'll bring that around. This one, I'm going to make this dark brown color that we have in our swatches. This grayish brown is what we're going to use for all of the rocks throughout this part of the design. I'll grab the no tool to adjust how these look. I just want them low enough because next we're going to add some little fish up here. I want to make sure they have room to swim. That looks good. Next, we're going to make some fish. Still working in those child layers, I'll press P for the Pen tool, and we can begin to make a simple fish shape. For the back fin, I'm just going to click once to make sharp nodes for this. Then we can connect it. There's our fish shape. I'm going to fill this with this orangey color of the sand. That looks pretty good. Let's just add some more detail to the fish. I'll give it a little smile. Then I'll press escape to end that line. Then I'll give it a little I using the ellipse tool. I'll just switch these colors and change the fill, so there's no fill. Now we can adjust this a little bit better. I like how this fish turned out, but I do think the lines look a little thick for it. I'll select the two layers that have strokes. I'll go to the stroke panel, and I'll lower this to two, just like we did for the stars for the outer space platform. With that done, I'm going to group all of these fish layers. Then I'm going to duplicate this fish. I'll grab the move tool and I'll hold command or control to duplicate. Then I'm just going to shrink one of these fish down. Next, I'm going to grab the ellipse tool again, and I'm just going to add a few bubbles surrounding the fish. So I'll hold shift to click and drag a little bubble. I'll go to the color panel, and I'll fill this with white. It has a nice thin black stroke and a white fill. I'm going to repeat this over and over just to create a few bubbles. As one last detail for this back wall, I'd like to add a little piece of seaweed over here. I'll press P for the Pen tool. Then I'm going to do three little pieces of seaweed that are all connected together. I'll click and drag to make a curved line. Then I'll hold Alt or Option to adjust that, and I'll bring it back around like that. Then I'll repeat this again, curved line. Alt or Option to bring it around, and I'll finish it, and I'll just do that one last time. H. For this seaweed, I'm just going to change the color. I think the medium green color is a little bit bright. I'm just going to change it to the color of the tree. Just to tone it down a little bit. Then I'm going to change the stroke back to three. Just so it matches the rest of the design. Now that the background is finished, let's add some objects to the sand. First, let's add some rocks. I'll change this rock shape to this color. Then because this is actually on the sand and not just part of this backdrop, I'd like to make this look more three D. To do that, I'm going to start tracing another shape. I'll just connect it like that. Then I'll make it this brown color but darker, and I'll place this behind the rocks. You can see what I did. Basically, I just offset this shape to the side to create a rough three D effect. I really like how these rocks are looking, so I just want to add one more rock to this front corner right here. I'll bring it around the outside. I'll make it the same brown color. Then I'm going to make it a child layer to the sand layer. Last, I'm going to add a little three D element off to the side here. I'll just click and drag and bring it a. I'll make this the same darker color as this rock, and I'll place this underneath. You can use the no tool to adjust any of these lines. Then we're done adding those rock lines. I really like how the seaweed looks back here. I'd like to add a few more pieces of seaweed to the sand and I'll use the pen tool to do that. I'll just do the exact same technique, creating lines and holding alt or option to change directions and bring it back around. This space underneath the slide looks a little bit empty. I'd like to add another plant. I'll click and drag, click and drag to create a U shape. Then I'm going to create a spiky looking plant. Clicking and drag and holding Alt or Option. It got messed up over here, but we'll fix that in a minute. I'm just going to change this to this last purple color we have here. With that, we've used all of our colors. Very nice. I'm just going to bring this so it's above the rock. Then using the node tool, I'll just adjust how this looks. I'll use the move tool to make this overall a bit smaller. Very nice. The last object I want to add has something to do with video games. This time, instead of a mystery box, I think it'd be fun to have a recovery heart. That'll just make this last platform a little more special. I'll go to our shape tools and select the Hart tool. I'll work in the front plane, edit and play, and I'll click and drag while holding shift to make a heart. I'm going to make the front of this heart, the same red color we have for here, since they're both in the front plane. Then using the move tool, I'm just going to duplicate and move this forward. Command or control and shift. Then I'll connect the two pieces using the Pen tool. I'll fill this with red. I'll bring it underneath and I'll connect the two back pieces. For this back part, I'll just make it the darker red color. Now our very last finishing touch for this video is I'd like to add a little bit of texture to the sand, and I'll just do that using the ellipse tool. I'll work in the top plane. I'm just going to hold shift to make tiny little circles with no stroke and a dark yellow fill. Using the tool, I'll just hold command or control and I'll duplicate these across to make patches like this to represent the little grains of sand. While I'm doing this, I'm just keeping my hand hovering over command or control, and then I'll click down whenever I need it. Okay, this turned out so good. I know it's tricky to get all of these different objects to line up nicely. Feel free to make any adjustments you'd like right now. In the next video, we're going to finish this project with some shadow and gradient details. 39. Shadows and Gradients: Let's finish our game platforms project with some shadows and gradients. Once you've decided you for sure like all of your colors, you can go ahead and start adding gradients to different areas. If you don't like your colors, make sure to use select same before you do this gradient step. I'm just going to go one platform at a time, and I'm going to add gradients, wherever I think looks good, you can add gradients just to the ground and the backdrop, if you'd like, or you could incorporate gradients into all of the objects. It really depends on what look you're going for. Just pay attention to the direction of the lighting. If you're going to create a gradient going from light to dark, it should follow the direction of the light. To speed up this process, as you select the layers, you can press V to select them with a move tool, and then you can press G to switch to the gradient tool. You can do that back and forth just to pick up the pace. For this design, I'm mainly adding gradients to the ground and the backdrops. But there is one object that I think it's very important that you add a gradient to it. That's the recovery heart. This is the one object that has both the top and the side planes exposed on the side. It really needs a gradient that goes from light on top to dark on the side. As long as you do that, you should be good to go. Once you're all finished with adding your gradients, we can go ahead and add some shadows. Let's go back to the grassy platform and start here. For the shadows, I'm mainly going to focus on these three D objects that we've created. Let's start with the tree. I'm going to select the Cloud tool. Then I'm going to edit in the top plane, and I'm going to click and drag while holding command or control and shift to drag out a cloud like this. Now, this cloud needs to have six bubbles just like the tree. That way, it looks like it's a reflection of the tree. Then I'm just going to place this shadow underneath the tree. I'm going to change its color to black. Then I'll press one on my keyboard to change the opacity to ten. You can see that looks like a pretty nice shadow, but this tuft of grass isn't recoloring because it's in the layer above. Just as a quick easy fix, I'm going to select that grass tuft, and I'm just going to sample the shadow color and apply that as the fill. That way we don't need to rearrange all of our layers. Let's add some shadows under the mystery blocks. This will make them look like they're floating because the shadow will be much lower, and it won't be making contact like it is with objects that are on the ground. For the mystery blocks, I'm going to grab the rectangle tool, and I'm still going to edit in the top plane. Then I'll hold shift to make a perfect square. I'll just keep that place right underneath this mystery block. I'm going to convert this to curves because these mystery blocks have rounded edges. Their shadow shod as well. I'll just pull out all of the sides to make this rounded. There we go. That looks pretty good. This rectangle has actually been turned into the color that we made the grass tuft. Just to keep things consistent, I'm going to make it black and then set it to 10% opacity. It looks exactly the same, but I just want to make sure all of our shadows are black. I'll press V for the move tool and then I'll hold command or control to duplicate this back for the other block. Next, I want to add a shadow to the stairs, and I'm going to need to use the pen tool for that. I'll press P for the Pen tool and I'll begin tracing along the stairs. I'm going to make sure I include all of the grass tuft in this shadow. I'll end it there. I'll hold shift to bring it straight across, and then I can connect it like that. I'll make this black, 10% opacity, and that looks pretty good. I'm going to do the same thing with this grass tuft. With the move tool, I'll just select it. Then I'm going to sample the color and apply it. Now you can see the grassy platform has all of its shadows. It looks so good. Let's do the star platform next. For this one, we mainly just have the stars and the mystery block to add shadows to. Let's start with the stars. I'll grab the star tool. We'll edit in the top plane, and I'll just hold command or control and shift to drag this out. Try to get it so it's a similar size. It doesn't have to be perfect for the shadow. I'm going to place this in the outer space category just to keep it straight. Then I'll make it black and 10% opacity. I'll grab the move tool and we can go ahead and duplicate this across. I'll hold command or control. Move it over here. Command or Control, move it over here. The mystery block is a little bit of a tricky one. Is it casting the shadow on the ground or on the star? That's up to us. I think I want it to appear that the shadow is cast on the star. That's what I'll do. Now, we already made a perfectly rounded shadow down here. I'll just double click a few times until I get to that. I hold command or control to duplicate it up. Then I'm going to take that layer, and place it into the outer space layers. It's hard to see this, but you see how it's overlapping. I just think that looks a little bit strange for this shadow. I'm going to place it as a child layer to the top of this star platform. First, I need to find that star platform. There it is. Here's the top piece, and then I need to find that shadow again. Then I'll make it a child layer. Now it's only on the star. It's very subtle. But I think that looks nice. We're done with that. Let's move on to the underwater layers. Let's start with the slide just so we don't forget. This slide is a little bit of a tricky one, but I'm going to place the shadow right underneath at a square shape, similar to this, and then I'll fade it out as it goes backward because the slide is going farther and farther away from the ground. I'll press p for the penol. Then I'm just going to trace out a shadow. Old ult or option to bring it around. We have a nice little square shape that mimics the slide. I'll fill this with black and set it to 10% opacity. Then you can see it's overlapping with the rock. I'm going to place this. It's underneath that rock layer. The rock has been placed as a child layer to the ground. I just need to make sure this is the very last child layer, and now you can see it's not overlapping anymore. O. To finish this off, I'm just going to grab the transparency tool. Then I'll click and drag to fade the shadow out. That was a little tricky, but now we get to do all the other shadows. I'm going to press P for the Pen tool, I'm going to trace a shadow around these background elements here. I'll just click right back here, and then I'll trace around here. I'll bring it around like that. I'll hold Alt or Option, and then I'll trace it around the inside. Okay, I'll make this black and 10% opacity. I don't love how it's overlapping with the shadow right here. I'm going to press A for the node tool, and I'll just bring this in so they don't overlap. The last thing I want to add a shadow to is this heart, and this is a little bit of a tricky shape. The heart isn't facing the ground, so it's not going to be a heart shape shadow. Instead, it'll probably be an oval shape. But what makes this tricky is the sand has a hill right underneath the heart. I think I'm just going to trace an abstract shape using the pen. I'll click and drag to make a bit of a strange looking oval like that. Then I'll make this black, 10% opacity. Using the move tool, I'll just move this so it looks like it's right underneath the heart. I think that looks pretty good for the shadow. With that, you are done with this lengthy project. We can go ahead and turn off the swatch colors, and if we want, we can add a background color. Black is very interesting. That does look cool. Great job. I hope you had fun with this project, and maybe you even had some memories of playing your first video game. In the next chapter, we're going to complete the final project of the course. 40. Mountain Campout Project: You made it. We're about to start the final chapter of the course. I've saved my favorite project for last. We're going to create a beautiful mountain side with a little tent camping out. It's going to be a really fun way to wrap things up, so let's get started. 41. Base Framing: This video, we'll set up the base that our design will sit on. Before we start, I'll show you the sketch that I made, just so you know the direction we're going in. You can see we have a beautiful mountain area on the left, and then we have trees, a little tent, and a winding river that flows off the edge. All of this is sitting on a circular base. In this video, we're going to build that circular base and we'll set up the grid. It'll all be pretty simple. First, let's set up the grid. For this design, I'm going to use the cube settings. I'll turn on show grid, and I'm going to change the O to 45 and the E to 20. You can see how flat that's made these squares, and I think that'll look really nice for this design. I'll close out of this. Now we can build the circular base. I'm going to grab the ellipse tool and edit in the top plane. I'll hold shift and I'll drag out a perfect circle. Then using the move tool. I'm just going to place this in the middle of the document, but I'll move it slightly down. Most of our design will sit on top of this circle, so we want to leave enough space up here. I'm going to make this circle green, and I'll make sure it has no color for the stroke. For the past few videos, we've designed our objects with a nice thick stroke. But for this design, I wanted to look more soft and blended, and a good way to do that is to remove the stroke. With all that set up, now we can make our base three D. I'm just going to duplicate and move this down. I'll bring this layer down, and then I'll connect it with the pen tool. I'll make this color green. Then I'll check on these points to make sure they look good. And I think they do. I'm going to select both of these layers and I'll add them with the add operation. Then I'll make this a slightly darker color. I'm going to layer this up. I'm actually going to duplicate this bottom part. I'll grab the move tool and then I'll duplicate this do. I'll move this underneath everything, and I'm going to make this brown color. New thing we're going to try in this project is we're going to add gradients and shadows as we go. You might prefer to save that for the end of your project so that you can more easily change the colors with the select same option. But I know all of these colors will look nice. Just to make things a little quicker this time, I'm going to go ahead and add some gradients. For this project, I'm going to assume the light source is coming from the top right and shining down. First, for this space, I'm going to grab the gradient tool. And I'll turn off edit in plain. Then I'm going to click and drag to make it lighter on this side and darker around this curve. I'll do the same for this green part right here, clicking and dragging to make this part slightly darker, and I'll leave the top alone. With all of that done, I'm just going to group all of these layers we just made, and I'm going to name them base. All right, with that, we're all set to build on top of this, which we'll start in the next video. 42. Mountains and River: Let's make the mountain range and the river in this video. Let's start by adding the mountains to the left side. These mountains will be relatively free form. But I do want to keep things somewhat aligned with the grid. What should I do? Well, first, I need to know which planes I'll be working in. We're going to make a quick mock up of a mountain using rectangles. I'll grab the rectangle tool and turn on edit and plane. Then I'm going to start with the front plane, and I'll just click and drag. To add a shape like this. You can see that this angle would be the front face of our mountains. Of course, our mountain will be a lot lumpier up here, but we could use this line as a guiding line for the bottom of our mountain. If I switch to the side play next, I'll just press escape and line it up here. You can see that this could be the side of our mountain. We can mainly have this big front piece at this angle for the bottom. Then we could add a piece to this side to make it look three D. I think this is a really good plan. I'm going to delete these bottom pieces. Then I'll grab the pen tool and I'll begin to trace out the front face of our mountain. To start, I'm just going to click and drag just a little bit to make a gentle curve. I'll just follow this line. You can see we're following this as a guide, and now I can go ahead and make our lumpy mountain. I'll grab the node tool and we can go ahead and adjust this however we'd like. I'll just hold shift and pull this out just a little bit. I think this shape looks pretty nice. I'm going to make this the light green color that we have on our top plane. That way this blends into the ground. Then using the pen tool, I can go ahead and add the other part of our mountain. I'll need to switch the plane to the side plane, I'll connect it on this side. Then I'll hold shift to follow this line. I'll click and drag. Now I can go ahead and connect this following the line of the mountain and connecting it at the top. I'll just bring it around. We can make this a darker green color. I'll bring this behind our front face of our mountain. Now you can see what that looks like. I'm following the lines with a slight curve to make things soft, but we have our first mountain done. I think this looks great. I'll just repeat this process to make the other mountains. I'll start in the front plane to make the front face of our mountain. Then I'll switch to the side plane to make a little piece that will make the mountain look three D. I. I just finished and I made four different mountain peaks. But because they're all the same colors, it looks a little confusing and repetitive. To change things up, let's add some gradients. I'm just going to turn off the grid, so that's not distracting for our colors. Then I'm going to use the gradient tool to adjust these colors. Starting with this front piece right here, I'm going to click from the bottom to the top, making it so this bottom part blends in with this top flame. But then we can slightly alter the color as we get to the top. I'll repeat this for all of the other pieces, making them slightly different colors of green. Now that we can see all of our mountains better, I'm just going to use the node tool to adjust some of these points. Once you have your mountains where you like them, we can go ahead and group all of the mountains together, and I'll just name this group mountains. Now that I'm looking at it, I don't really like that this part of the base and this part of the mountain are blending together. I'm actually going to adjust this one's gradient. That's better. Now to finish off the video, let's add in the river. I'll grab the pen tool, and we can go ahead and trace out a winding river on the top of this base. We're going to make this a child layer. Feel free to trace a little bit outside of this circle. I'm going to make this river blue and a child layer to the top of the base. I'll use the node tool to adjust this a little bit. I think that looks pretty good. To finish this off, I'm just going to add a piece that spills over on the edge right here. I'll press P for the Pen tool, and I'm going to line it up with the edge and with this river pen path. I'll click to add a point. I'll do the same over here. Then I'll hold shift to go straight down and I'll line it up like that. I'll line it up with this point and the bottom edge. I'll click and click. I've made a perfect rectangle here that lines up perfectly on all of these corners. I'll make this the blue color, but slightly darker, and I'll drag this so that it's above the base. Now you can see what this is looking like, and we have a straight edge here. I'll press A for the node tool, and I'll just drag this down, so it matches the curve of our base, and I'll do that up here as well. It's not perfectly precise, but it looks pretty good. As long as you can't see the brown or the green underneath, I think you're good to go for this part. A great work. I think this looks really nice. In the next video, we're going to make some trees to fill in the space. T. 43. Trees: In this video, we'll learn how to make two types of trees that will look really nice in this scene. One of the trees will be fluffy and rounded. The other one will be more spiky like a Christmas tree. Let's start by making the fluffy round tree. We already made a simple version of this tree in the platforms project. But I want to show you a way that you can customize this tree and make it look more organic. To start, I'm just going to make the tree over here off to the side, we can go ahead and make the trunk. We'll use the exact same technique as we did before. I'll grab the ellipse tool, I'll edit in the top plane, and then I'll click and drag to make the bottom of the trunk. I'll make this circle brown. Then using the Move tool, I'm going to go ahead and duplicate and move this up. I'll hold command or control and shift to shrink this down. Then I'll connect these two shapes using the Pen tool. Starting in the very center, I'll click. I'll click in the center of this one. Then we can go ahead and click on the very edges, and curve them. Hold alt or option. Change directions and then you can close the curve. I'll make this the brown color. Then I'll duplicate this with command or control J. Then with the move tool selected. We can go ahead and flip this horizontal and move it over. I'll select all of these and I'll add them with the add operation. Now we have our trunk. We'll use this trunk for both of the trees. Make sure you like the proportions here. Now we can go ahead and make the leaves of our fluffy tree. To do this, I'm going to grab the ellipse tool and I'm going to turn off it plane. Then I'm going to make a flattened ellipse that looks like this. I'm going to make this green. I'll choose this color right here. Then using the move tool, I'm going to duplicate this to create a bushy shape. I hold command or control, and I'll just duplicate over and over again. That looks pretty good to me. Once you have a nice little bushy shape like this, go ahead and select all of those layers and group them in the layers. Now we can go ahead and duplicate this around to build a tree. I'll hold command or control and move this. I'll make this a little bit of a darker green and I'll move it underneath. We're just going to layer this over and over like that. Duplication, make it, adjust where it is in the layers and do it again. Right now, it might look pretty obvious that we've duplicated this over and over because all of these groupings are tilting downward. They'll have this diagonal shape to them. To add some variety, I'm going to flip a few of these horizontally. Now that we have that done, we can go ahead and select all of these and place them where we'd like them on the tree. Just like that, we have a much more natural organic looking tree. I'm just going to group all of these layers together, and we can name this fluffy tree. I don't think this layer should be on. There we go. All of the higher layers are on top of the ones beneath them. That looks better. Now that we have our fuffy tree done, we're going to go ahead and make our spiky tree next. Just to save some time, I'll select the trunk and duplicate it to use it for the spiky tree. I'll drag it outside of the fluffy tree group. Now we can just focus on making the greenery. We're going to use a similar technique to the last tree. But to start, I'm going to add a triangle to the top to create a cone shape. I'll go to the shape tools and select the triangle tool. Then I'll click and drag out a triangle. I'll place this so that it's centered with the tree. Then I'll hold shift to raise it up, and we can begin to round this out nicely. To make this look more rounded, we're going to add circles to the bottom of the cone. I'll grab the ellipse tool. I'm going to click and drag out a circle like that. It doesn't have to be a perfect circle. Then using the, I'll hold command or control to duplicate this and move it so that it lines up with the edge. Now, this doesn't have to be perfectly lined up. If yours bumps out a little bit, I think that's just fine. I'm going to make sure that the center circle is pulled down just a little bit to create a cone shape that's surrounded on the bottom. With that, we're done with the first cone shape. I'm going to group these layers and I'm going to make them the lightest color that we have over here. It's just easier to keep the colors consistent. I'm going to make this group a little bit smaller, but still centered with the trunk. I'm going to duplicate this shape and move it down now with command or control and shift. I'll lower this beneath the top layer, and I'll make this one the next darkest color. As this tree grows bigger and bigger toward the bottom, we're going to need to extend how this next shape looks, and to do that, I'm actually going to hold command or control and just make this triangle a little bit wider every time. Then I can go ahead and add circles with command or control. I'll make sure that's lined up nicely and I'll do the same for this side. Then I can take the existing circles. I'll hold shift to select them all. And I'll move them down. That way, we still have this nice curved shape at the bottom. But now we have a gap. I'll take one of the circles and I'll just duplicate it up. Now we have this nice shape for our next one and it should be all grouped together nicely like this. Let's repeat this again. I'll hold command or Control and Shift to duplicate. I'll double click in and then I'll select the triangle and hold command or Control to stretch it out. Then I'm just going to select all of the circles and I'll bring them down a little bit so that I can make some room for this new one. I'll line it up nicely there. That looks pretty good. Now I can select all of the other circles and bring them down. We can fill in these gaps by duplicating the other circles. I'll select the whole group and make it a darker color. And I'll bring it down. We can repeat this as many times as we want to make the tree look how tall we want it. I'm going to do this one more time with adding circles. I'll hold command or control and shift to duplicate it. I'll come in here and select the triangle. I'll make it larger while holding command or control. I'll add some circles to the sides. Then I'll select all of these other circles. And I'll move them down. With that all filled in, I'll just make this the next darkest color. There we go. Now to finish off this tree, I'm just going to do this the lazy way. I'll select this layer, I'll duplicate it down. Then I'll just make the whole thing wider with command or control. I'll make the whole group darker. With all of those done, we can go ahead and resize them and place them on the tree where we want them. I'll group all of these layers. I'll just rename this spikey tree. To add variety to our design, I'm going to duplicate each of these trees to make different color versions of them. For both of the trees, we already have the green color swatch. But I also want to use the red color and the orange color variety. I'll select each tree and duplicate it twice. Then I'll start by just changing all of the colors of the fluffy tree here. Once you have those colors looking how you want them, we can use those colors for the spiky tree. I'll just sample those colors and apply them to each layer. I realize that evergreen trees don't really look like this red co, but this is just for the design, and I think this is going to look really nice in the end. Let's do this last one. We're going to do the orange colors next. And I'll repeat this with sampling the colors for the spiky tree. Now that we have all of these lovely trees, we can move them and duplicate them around our design. I'm going to turn off snapping as I do this. So I have more control over the placement of all of these trees. I've used up all of our trees, but I'd like to add a few more trees over here. I'm going to duplicate this red tree and I'll duplicate the green tree. Because I'm duplicating this red tree and it's right next to our other red tree. It might look a little obvious that these are the same tree. I'm going to flip this one horizontally just so they look a little different. As I was placing these trees, I wanted to keep them bunched together like this because I like how that looks. But also, this will make it easier to add one big shadow around the whole bunch. Let's add a few loose shadows using the pen tool. I'll make each of these shadows black and then I'll press one on my keyboard to give it 10% opacity. Then I'll drag it, so it's under all the trees. And I'll repeat this for all of the other trees. As you're doing this, make sure you avoid touching the edge. If you don't see a way around touching the edge, maybe it's a good idea to move your tree inward just a little bit. That's all finished. Let's make sure to save our work with command or Control S. We're done with the trees, and we might move them around a little bit more as we add more objects to the scene. But for now, I think this looks really good. In the next video, we're going to add in a tent. A 44. Tent: Let's add a cute little tent to the scene. To start, we'll do the basic shape of the tent using the triangle tool. I'm going to place it right here and I'd like to work with the grid again, I'll turn the grid back on and I'll change to the front plane. I'll turn snapping back on. Then we can go ahead and grab the triangle tool, make sure we're editing in plane and we can get started. I'm going to make this. The triangle starts at one of these cross sections, and we spread it across, so it hits three of these squares. Then I'll raise this up, so it's two squares tall. I'm going to make this the orange color. Now we have the front of our tent. I'll just hold shift to move this forward a little bit. So we have room. Then I'm going to duplicate and move this backwards. This is the back of the tent, and now we can connect these two pieces using the Pen tool. I'll fill this with that same orange color. Then we can just make sure that all of these points line up nicely and they do. I'll select both of those layers. I'll add them together. Then I'll make them a little bit of a deeper color. Next, I want to make a few openings in the tent. First, I want to make the front have a bit of a triangle shaped opening right here. I'll grab the triangle and I'll just click and drag out a triangle. I want this to line up at the very top point and reach the bottom. To turn this into an opening, I'm going to duplicate this triangle with command or Control J. I'll turn off this top one and we'll come back to that later. But the next step I want to do is I'll take this duplicate and the front of the tent. Then I'll use the subtract operation to cut a hole in our tent like this. Now that we've cut that out, this shape is a curve and we can use the node tool to adjust it. I'll press A for the node tool, and then I'm just going to bend some of these a little bit. I'll bend this opening inward. I'll bend this side of the tent in and this side. Then I'm going to go to the back of the tent and do something similar here. I'll bend this part in and this part in. I think I'll also bend this part down a little bit. Just so it looks like the tent is draping out. Now we can go ahead and turn this triangle back on. I'll move this underneath. You can see that beautiful curving right there. I'm going to make this the dark brown color. I'll just sample this from the tree. To add even more detail to this opening, I'm actually going to create a new shape using the Pen tool. I'll start in this corner, I'm going to draw a line that mimics this line right here. I'll switch to the side plane and I'll hold shift. Then I'll just bring this up and around. I'm going to make this an even darker brown. And I'll make this a child layer to this triangle. You can see this has just added a little bit of depth to the tent like you're really seeing inside of it. I really like how this is looking so far. Next, let's make another opening to the tent by adding a little window over here, working in the side plane. I'm going to grab the rectangle tool and I'll click and drag to add a little rectangle right here. I'm going to bring this so it's above everything. There we go. Then I'm going to use the corner tool to curve in these corners up at the top. Then I'll select both of these top nodes. With the node tool, I'm just going to pull these back so that it matches this right here, this diagonal line. I'll also curve in these sides just a little bit, and I'll pull this in just a little bit more so this match is better. But you can see now we have a tilted little window on the wall of the tent. I like the fill being dark brown, but I want to add a stroke. I'll bring this up to one for the stroke, and I'll change the color of the stroke to this medium brown color. Maybe I'll make the stroke a little bit larger, just so you can see it better. There we go. We're done with the main part of the tent. But I do want to add a few other details. First, I want to add some tent stakes so that our tent doesn't blow away. I'm going to grab the rectangle tool and I'll turn off edit in plame. I'm going to click and drag to draw a little tent stake right in this corner, and I'm going to remove the stroke, but I'll keep the fill this dark brown color. Then I'm going to grab the corner tool, I'll select all of the corners and bend them all in ward. We have this pill shape. With that done, I'm going to grab the move tool, and I'll just move and duplicate this around the corners of our tent. I'll set them off at an angle to. Now to tie the tent down to the stakes, I'm going to press P for the Pen tool, and I'm going to use perfectly straight lines to connect the very top of the tent to the edge of the stake. Then I'm going to do a zig zag shape like this. I'll change it, so the stroke color is white, and I'll change the stroke to make it a little bit skinnier, so it looks like a string. That looks good. I'm going to repeat this for the other ones. I'll press Escape. I'll click. I'll connect it and do a zigzag. I'll do that for the last one as well. To finish. I'm just going to use the pen tool to draw a rough shadow around our tent. I'll remove the stroke and add a black fill. I'll press one to make it 10% opacity, and then I'll lower it, so it's under our tent layers. Now I'll just select all of those layers and group them together, and we can rename this tent. To finish, we can go ahead and resize this and position it however we'd like. This looks so nice. We're almost done. In the next video, we're going to add some finishing touches to this project. 45. Grass and Logs: This video we'll finish the project by adding some grass and logs to the scene. Let's start with grass. I'm going to create a tuft of grass, and then I'm going to duplicate it around the scene and flip it around just to make things easier. I'll grab the pen tool, and I'll start by clicking and dragging just a little bit. Then I'll click and drag outward. I'll hold Alt or Option as I'm clicking and dragging to change directions. Then I'll click again and repeat. All right, I'll just use the node tool to adjust this point. I want this bottom part to look a little bit rounded and soft. Okay. I'm going to make this this green color of the tree. And I think that looks pretty nice. Using the move tool, I'm just going to duplicate this around the scene. I'll hold command or control and I'll place it over here. I'll flip this one since they're next to each other. I'll also turn off snapping for now just so I can place these better. I'm going to select a few of these. So I'll hold shift to select them both. And then I'm going to change their color. Just add even more variety. We're done with the grass. I'm just going to group all of these grass layers, and I'll rename it grass. Let's add our last object now. I'm going to add a log to this area. I'm going to edit in the front plane. I'll grab the ellipse tool and edit in plane, and then I'll hold shift to drag out a perfect circle like this. Then I'm going to turn snapping back on and using the move tool. I'm just going to duplicate this back. And then using the pen tool, I'll connect these two pieces. I'll double check these points. I think that looks pretty good. I will add these two layers together for the back. Now we can go ahead and recolor these shapes. We have one more color swatch left up here. I'm going to apply this color to both of these shapes. Then I'll take this front piece right here and I'll make this an even lighter color. T Now that we have the log shape, we can go ahead and add some details to it. First, I'm going to add some rings to this part of the log. To do that, I'm going to duplicate this ellipse with command or Control J. Then while holding command or control and shift. I'm just going to decrease it size. Then I'm going to make it the sampled color. I'll do this again, Command or Control J. It should automatically resize, and I'll make this the lighter color that we had created. Let's do this again. Making this the darker color. Let's do it one more time, making this the lighter color. Now we should have rings that look like this. I think it looks really nice. Let's move on to the side. To make this look like bark of a tree. I'm going to use the pen tool to just add some lines. I'll hold shift to keep these lines perfectly straight. Then I'm going to change the stroke color. I'm going to use the dark brown color of the tree that's right next to it. I think that looks pretty nice. I'll press escape to end my line, and then I can continue to add more lines like this. I like the detail that these lines add, but I do think they're a little bit dark against this log. I'll select them all and make them a little bit lighter. I'm just going to select all of those layers that we just made for the log. I'll group them and rename it log. Now I'll just grab the move and we can go ahead and position this log. I'm going to place it here, and I'll move this grass tuft, so it's in front of the log. There we go. Then I'm going to take the log and I'm actually going to duplicate it and move it over here. I'm going to flip this one horizontally. That'll be a nice log for our camper to sit on. Now that we've placed all of these grass tufts and the logs, we may need to adjust our shadows a little bit. I'm going to grab the node tool and I'm just going to drag the nodes out to make sure that all of these areas are in shadow. All right, and with that, we're done with this project. I'll just select all of our layers. Using the move tool, I'll make sure this is nice and centered. And there we are. I think this looks so good. Great job. I hope you enjoyed this final project of the course. 46. Class Conclusion: Congratulations. You finished the course. I'm so proud of you. I know that was a lot to learn. I hope you enjoyed the lessons, and I'm so excited for you to go out and create your own isometric art. Thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next Affinity Revolution Tutorial.