 Hi, I'm Kyle and this video is brought to you by the Old Road Zine. Check the description for details. Today we are talking about all of the tricky stuff with isometric maps, staircases, archways, and ellipses. The first thing you gotta know about isometric mapmaking is everything is based on the cube. If you can understand the anatomy of this little simple object, your life is going to be tremendously easier. So let's try to understand all the different faces of this cube. We're gonna start out by using an actual physical object. This is just a piece of crafting foam insulation that I have lying around. So I am going to trace some circles onto this using a stencil so we know where we're starting with and we can understand how the optical illusion of isometric perspective works. I'm going to continue to refer to this block as a cube. So bear with me, I know what a cube is, it's not equal on all sides, give me a break here. First of all, you can see that there's a tilt. So when you change the angle of this 3D object, these circles are going to flatten out into ellipses that are all pointing in different directions. If you can understand the axis of these circles, which way they are facing, it's really gonna help out. So I'm going to label each of these axis right on the cube to help us keep track. And it's a great idea to do this when you're first starting out on the paper as well. So we have the y-axis going up, we have the x-axis going to the left, and we have the z-axis going along to the right. So using this tape, we can see how easy it is to flatten an ellipse for the y-axis. But when you turn it to the z-axis, you want to turn it 90 degrees, but you actually need to keep tilting it to make sure that it's matching the angle of that face, to match the axis of the z. It's actually coming down at an angle along a way. It's not just turn to the side, it's not just rotated. And you can see this optical illusion by using a stencil for these isometric ellipses. When you are drawing an isometric map, pick one of the two side faces, the x-axis or the z-axis. In this case, I've picked the z-axis to put all of my shadows on. And you'll see how this helps us draw stairs. So to draw stairs, we're gonna start with a cube like we always start with in all of this. And then we're going to cut the cube in half by connecting the access points along the side faces and kind of just carving out a wedge. And then by making sure the top of that stair matches the direction of the isometric grid, down is always going to be down, but side to side is always going to be going along the x-axis or the z-axis. So we kind of carve it out along each side of that wedge that we created from the cube. And then we just kind of connect it through. The top of each step is on the y-axis. The side of the staircase is the x-axis and the front of each step is the z-axis. So we're going to shade that in because we've already decided everything on the z-axis is going to have a shadow on it. And we can see we've already made a pretty convincing little staircase that would go up, you know, say five feet or so. All right, that stairs down, but how about ellipses? Well, to understand ellipses, again, let's build out that cube and let's see if we can't replicate some of the angles that we saw on that foam block from the beginning of the video. We can find the halfway points of this that's going to help us use an isometric circular template. All right. So we can see these tick marks that are kind of x-ing through the middle of this. We choose our spot. We get it all lined up and we just trace our circle using the stencil. I highly recommend using a stencil as opposed to freehanding these. Trust me, it's going to save you an awful lot of trouble. You can see that this ellipse is perpendicular. It is intersecting and facing in the direction of the y-axis. And so the shortest ends of this ellipse are pointing up, all right, because they're pointing in the direction of the y-axis because this is facing in that direction. So if we do just a little bit of contour shading on the inside of this, we can kind of turn this ellipse into a hole and kind of drill into this cube to kind of make a convincing illusion of depth. When we do the side faces, the x and the z faces, we need to make sure that the short sides of that ellipse are lining up along a straight line along the proper axis. All right. To complete the illusion, you can't just take the stencil and turn it 90 degrees. It has to it has to line up along the axis, which is not on a 90 degrees. It's like on a 60 degree angle or something like that. So if you can make those short edges point along the proper axis, it's really going to help make your ellipses look convincing. If you mess this up, your ellipses are going to look dopey and soggy. And the proper perspective illusion is not going to be achieved. Now, what self-respecting dungeon wouldn't have arched doorways? That is such a visual cue that we are talking about kind of like a stinky medieval dungeon so we can use what we have learned about ellipses to set up proper archways in our dungeons. And once you understand which direction to place your ellipse ellipse template, things become a lot easier. So I've drawn some walls here and I could just kind of free hand the archway and kind of hope it looks OK. But the better thing to do, the thing you really should be doing is using the axis to line up an ellipse where it's supposed to go. And that's going to give you the proper arch in your archway. And it's really going to help straighten out that perspective and make those faces legible and clean and just makes your map just that much more beautiful. Once we've used the template to straighten out our archways, using knowing that the Z axis is the one that is getting the shadows, we can just fill that in and it automatically brings in that depth. And we fill in the side of the wall and the inside of the archway to really give this drawing some volume. And then we can start adding some detail. So if this is a crumbly rock archway, we just need to make sure that the sides of those those stones building up the sides of that archway are going across along the Z axis. And then we're all set. And knowing that the Z axis is getting that shadow on the other side. It's very easy to add just a little bit of depth by just adding adding some shadows to to make it look like it is kind of coming out from that wall just a little bit. And it's going to be such a small, tiny detail. All you need is just a big black stroke kind of showing you where the stone begins and ends, and that's going to do it. Then you just kind of use, you know, the the access to fill in the bottoms and tops of those bricks. And you make them just a little crumbly and uneven and characterful in that way. And and you're all set. You're basically there. This is this is the rest of this is on Easy Street. Once you understand which direction you're supposed to be going in, once you understand the faces and the axis, shading, details and and wall textures, it all becomes much, much easier. So this is the latest map that I've completed for the old road scene. And it's kind of this weird kind of agrarian cult, lots of organic shapes. Right. But knowing about how to use the ellipse template, we can see how many ellipses are actually hiding all over the place. And if any of these were off, if any of these weren't looking good, it wouldn't be as convincing an illusion. It wouldn't have this kind of invitation to think about the depth of the reality. So the the mushrooms, the holes, the well, the hornets, nest, all of this stuff is using this ellipse technique and understanding the faces. Well, that's it for this video. I hope I have cleared up some of the things that people seem to struggle with. If there's anything else that you would like me to talk about and make a little video or tutorial about, let me know in the comments below. If you like this video, go ahead and subscribe to the channel and maybe one day we will meet on the old roads. Farewell.