Isometric Affinity Designer Ipad



We’ve spent a long time developing Affinity Designer for iPad, in fact,​ we first posted a sneak peek over 3 years ago! But in 2018 we also had some extra help behind-the-scenes…

Isometric Affinity Designer Ipad Preset Shapes

In 2018, we commissioned a select group of creatives to take part in a special Affinity Designer for iPad beta. The purpose of this was to get a mix of designers and illustrators to test the most ambitious app we’ve ever made. We recruited a mix of seasoned Affinity users, and some who’d never used Affinity for their work. Some of the participants had never used an iPad in their creative workflow either.

We set them all the same challenge… create your style of work using your workflow in Affinity Designer for iPad and tell us what you think of it.

The participants clocked up hundreds of hours of creating and giving us their feedback, Affinity Designer for iPad is the app it is now thanks to them. Let’s find out who took part, what they thought of the app and the artwork they created…

Agata Karelus

Isometric grid in Affinity Designer How We’ll Describe the Isometric Grid. Windows and iPad, Affinity Designer is setting the new industry standard in the world of design. Best in class for creating concept art, print projects, logos, icons, UI designs, mock-ups. Choose Your Favourite Affinity Designer Brushes Today. Hope you've found this article on the best free Affinity Designer brushes helpful. As you can see, there are many wonderful Affinity assets free on the internet, but if you're looking for the very best Affinity Designer brushes for an important project, we highly recommend Envato Elements. Affinity Designer has a versatile grid system with some really good tools for things like icon design, and it also has isometric grids for doing graphics for games. We'll start by showing the grid. So head up to the View menu, and then check the Show Grid submenu. That brings up the default grid.

Isometric Illustration Affinity Designer Ipad

Agata Karelus is an illustrator and graphic designer based in Warsaw, Poland. A crazy colourist, Agata is in love with all kinds of creatures and monsters. A pro-user of Affinity Designer, Agata’s insight was invaluable in the beta and her artwork always brightens our day. Oh, she also did the Styles for Affinity Designer for iPad, thanks Agata!

You can find out more about Agata in her Affinity Spotlight profile, or at www.gagatka.pl.

“I’ve tried other creative apps on the iPad before, but I didn’t fall in love with any of them… but Affinity Designer for iPad makes me smile. I was surprised at how easy it was to navigate and that the workflow was as fast as I needed it to be.”

Affinity Designer guru, Frankentoon, has created this awesome tutorial to introduce the new Isometric Panel in Affinity Designer 1.7…

The new Affinity Designer 1.7 update gives us all a MASSIVE set of new features and improvements that are quite simply impossible to detail all in a single post. So, to keep our heads from exploding into tiny pixels, we are going to focus exclusively on the new isometric drawing tools and break them down as smoothly as possible. The result being, that by the end of this tutorial, you’ll be able to create your own organic isometric assets like a pro.

You can get all the assets I created for this tutorial using the download button below.

Tip: Designer You can learn to how to install Assets in Affinity Designer in our guide to installing creative resources.

1. Setting up the Isometric Grid

Isometric affinity designer ipad undo

Affinity Designer’s 1.7 update, adds new options to the Grid and Axis Manager Panel. However, for this tutorial, we’re going to focus exclusively on the Isometric Grid settings. You can see a quick overview in this video:

2. Getting to know the NEW Isometric Panel

This is a huge one. This panel is going to basically save you tons of steps by projecting your shapes into isometric planes automatically.

Let’s see how it works:

3. Stepping up the game

So, you’re thinking making simple geometry like isometric buildings and cityscapes is now almost too easy using Affinity Designer? Well, let’s challenge ourselves then. How about crossing (just a little bit) the boundaries between 3D and 2D art?

One style of 3D art that I LOVE is so-called low-poly art. Before Affinity Designer 1.7, creating this type of art was totally feasible but was really time-consuming since you needed to perform more calculations using the Transform Panel.

Let’s make some happy trees.

Having the tools to manipulate shapes more efficiently allows us more creative licenseto draw our shapes.

Tip: Learn more about mixing vector and raster graphics in this tutorial.

As you can see, just by following this simple technique shown in the image above, you can come up with many shapes to combine together and create a nice collection of reusable isometric assets for your projects.

Tip: Avoid using RIGHT angles (90°) when drawing your planes, ​to make your objects look more organic and stylised.

4. Create anything you can imagine.

All of the assets for this tutorial have been made in the same way. The Isometric Panel is both, a time saver and a creativity booster since it helps you to focus more on your artwork creatively and less on the technical aspects.

Remember, you aren’t limited to just 4-sided faces, to add complexity to your shapes, you can draw multiple-side polygons (1). The more sides you add, the less rigid your assets will look when projected (2).

The process of creating the top and bottom planes (3) and then, connecting the dots to draw faces (4), remains the same.

5. Using textures.

To give some character and depth to your isometric objects, you can use the techniques shown in THIS TUTORIAL we made a while ago, explaining in detail how to add raster textures to vector shapes in Affinity Designer.

6. Time to play!

Once you’ve created some individual isometric assets, you can arrange them and make quick compositions to test what works best for your scene. These new features in Affinity Designer 1.7, will allow you to build more intricate illustrations in half the time.

Visit Frankentoon’s TOON LAB for more Affinity Designer tutorials covering a range of techniques from quick complex masking and painting with textures, to emulating retro graphics and comic book illustration.

Affinity Designer Isometric Grid

This tutorial is aimed at desktop users of Affinity Designer 1.7, though its worth noting that Affinity Designer on iPad has also had isometric features added in our 1.7 update!