Isometric Designs

These are my first illustrations created using an isometric perspective. I found the perspective a bit challenging but it was harder to illustrate in a free form fashion.

In order to make things easier for myself, I winded up creating a custom grid on the walls and flooring of the isometric room. I was able to get the measurements of the room through a project manager that I had worked with as these illustrations were designs for a virtual world website for a large plush toy company. The themed rooms were to be featured on their website for their virtual world animal characters.

Once I got the measurements and created the custom grid, I began creating the sketching out ideas for the interior designs of the rooms based on the themes I was assigned. I worked on over 7 different theme room designs and created custom furniture in different angles and views (SE, SW, NE, NW). The rest of the themed rooms were given to others on my team as we all had to reach the client's deadline by completing a total of 20 themed rooms.

I enjoyed the learning process of working with illustrations in not only an isometric perspective but in different angles within an isometric perspective. So, for example, if I created an Easter themed bed, then I had to create that bed in a front, back, left and right view so that animators could program the views into the room's virtual world function on the website...and more importantly, so that the animal characters could interact with the furniture by having the user be able to rotate the views of the furniture pieces.

The themed rooms featured here are the Zoo, Art and Music Theme rooms respectively.

"3rd Eye Cinema"

3rd Eye Cinema is the name of a company that I started with friends and fellow classmates in my Visual Communications program. A lot of us had the same classes throughout the program and as a result, many of the connections developed into friendships.

One of the most enjoyable classes that I had was my Final Cut Pro class. As with my 3D Studio Max course, I didn't know what to expect. I hadn't taken a video editing class before or done anything extensively with motion graphics. I was very intrigued however and as with all of my classes, I dove in head first.

We were given quite a few assignments and the theme of our final project was to be developed by the class as a group effort. The initial idea was to do a karate skit but I felt that we should perhaps do a horror film. I have to admit I wanted my idea to come through because I am a fan of horror genre films. I argued that this would be different and exciting and we could choose to add in other genres to a horror theme...for example, horror comedy, horror drama and so forth. It could have gone any way.

Everyone eventually agreed to my idea and we each brainstormed and worked on creating a plot. We decided to base the horror film on our campus...making it a whodunit horror film that took place in a school environment.

We worked through creating a storyboard after developing our plot, and we even got school administrators, other students in different programs, and various teachers involved in a lot of the acting roles. The next step was to shoot our scenes and take turns getting involved in different film crew roles so that we learned about all of the processes involved in making a short film.

I found that everyone became closer and I really enjoyed the energy and chemistry we had together as a group. It was so amazing that I started to think that we could do this as a business if we wanted to...if we all invested in the idea, put our heads and talents together and went for it. As the film was near the end of its production, I brought up the idea to my friend and classmate Emily. She immediately liked the suggestion and later we discussed it with everyone else in class.

This brought on, initially, the idea of starting a film/video club on campus. We talked to a few administrators and signed up for petitioning the inclusion of this club. Our idea was accepted and we started to have regular meeting and advertise the club around campus for others to join. We got great response and at some point, I brought up the business end of the film making idea again, but I wanted to include people who were in our small circle because that was where the trust and chemistry was.

Everyone in that circle came on board and we went ahead and established 3rd Eye Cinema. I was responsible, as president, for getting the business affairs together and establishing the meetings. We got the FBN statements filed, we began writing our business plan as a group and I mentioned I would start working on the website.

Some people agreed that one of my character designs was going to be the mascot design of the company. I had created a character called Panash [puh-NOSH] and I established the website design around him as well as our business colors which were blue, lime green and deep purple.

The page template was created in Photoshop CS, taken into ImageReady CS for slicing and rollovers, as well as optimization and then it was taken into Dreamweaver CS for further customization, set up and HTML adjustment. We were able to get a domain deal through one of our favorite instructors as well as web hosting. So once all of that was set up, I used CuteFTP to load the HTML and image files onto the server.

What happened to the company that we started? Well it was all about timing and ongoing collaboration. It was a tough year and we were all nearing the time of graduation so classes and projects were piling up intensely as well as personality obligations. Meetings were harder to schedule and hold consistently so over time, the buzzing energy around the business fizzled out and became scattered.

However, I still think it's a great idea and I still own the rights to the name and identity as well as the domain, so I'd like to do something soon with the business idea in the near future. It certainly shouldn't be completely abandoned.