Hi all,
I’m trying to use Blender as an isometric illustration tool, mainly for diagrams.
The base image is here: http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-illustration-16664947-hospital-building-isometric.php?st=55e30d7
Please, could you give me your feeling about light settings, shadows, colors, shaders, world?
Thanks a lot.
PS: camera is not perfectly set. It should be set at (a,a,a), a real number, and pointing to (0,0,0).
You want to use them on a firm grid? In that case you probably want to use rendering in Ortho view from the viewport. Re. lighting this really depends on what you want to achieve and how realistic the presentation models should look. If you want them to look like the normal powerpoint use versions, probably better to do the work in inkscape to create scalable vector graphics instead as they will be easier to use. The reference you posted is a vector scalable. If you only want to use in one size (or can resize in blender yourself), you could also try to go for the full blown 3D (perspective). Although I played with some business renders lately and found that real 3D in presentations comes with the trade off on “easy to read” as real world sizing and perspective makes things in the background smaller very quickly.
Thanks for reply.
I’ve already made scalable graphics with Inkscape but since I discovered Blender, I found it much more convenient,
even though it’s not scalable.
Actually, what I would like to know it how to render things unrealistically 
Ok, you should be able to achieve this through using simple materials and less compositing, normally it is a task to get to a realistic view. Blender Internal gives you very hard shadows already, if you work with single light sources you can get the usual harder shadows (combined with some basic sky texture lighting those are becoming grey instead of black). Also, you can achieve the very artificial core reflection you see in things like the Apple iPhone pictures by giving a reflective material and setting a whie plane in front of the object and behind the camera and rotating it to the correct angle. There is a blenderguru tutorial where Andrew Price uses this technique (the tut is called “how to create a slick phone ad” or so). You will see what I mean once you see the tut picture or go to the apple site.
If you want to go even more unrealistic style, check out the blender internal cell shaders - switch the shader from Lampert to Toon (right beside the diffuse in the materials settings).
Also check this site out: http://blendernpr.org/ Dedicated to Non-Photorealistic Rendering
Hope this helps.
