Isometric drawing tools
Someone

Hi,

Someone knows about an isometric drawing tool to draw quickly tiles an animated characters (at professional nice level... not 8 bit style)?

 

Where I can find royalty free isometric graphic to start testing my code?

 

Thanks!

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Gio

Hi

 

Flat isometric tiles are "easy" to make:

 

  1.  create a square picture (say 256x256), making it tileable (if you don't have Photoshop you can use this excellent tool to make it tilleable, though it isn't free).
  2. rotate 45 degrees; this gives you a picture that is 362x262.
  3. resize by 50% on the Y axis, so you get a nice 362x181 isometric tile

Hills and walls are a lot harder to make, I don't know if you're going to need them. There are tricks to generate them out of flat images, which is what we did for this tile set. We are working on a map editor that will include the script we used at some point.

 

For characters (and sometimes for walls and hills, etc), what a lot of people do (including ourselves), is start from a 3D mesh and render it with a 3D program (such as Blender), using an isometric perspective.

 

If it's purely for testing purposes, I'd recommend getting the minimap demo that comes with a few tiles and a character (though a very limited animation set). However the license of the minimap demo doesn't allow you to redistribute or use them in a released game (but if you got the tile set and characters from our market of course you could :) ). Some characters in the market are free (just have a quick look), some others are not, but they are all royalty-free, meaning you can use them in any projects, including commercial ones.

 

This website has some free isometric stuff - I'm not a big fan of the art style but hey, it's free so you can't really complain.

 

I hope this helps

Someone

Thanks, the website with isometric stuff is good for a prototype so I think I will use it.

 

Wade is or will be compatible with Tiled Map Editor (I have seen there is a json format)?

 

Do you know where I can find someone that draws custom sprites and tiles in a funny cartoon style? I see that many games developed could be sold only with a great graphics and without that they seems only an experiment.

 

Thank you

Gio
You are correct, both WADE and Tiled use Json formats, and in principle it wouldn't be too difficult to convert from Tiled to WADE, and this is something we want to do at some point. However the Tiled format has got only a subset of the WADE format's features, so it would only work for relatively simple maps. We are working on a map editor specifically for WADE though. Hopefully it isn't going to take much longer, but I cannot say for sure when it's going to be ready.

Regarding your other question, I don't know anyone who does that with isometric graphics, sorry. Maybe someone else will know... If you find someone let us know :)
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