Isometric builder

[Fabiano]

Anyone know a good isometric map builder?
I'm planning using isometrics for some ags tests.

[ras_maxim]

i was looking  for compact and convinient graphic editor for creating isometric images, or for converting regular tiles to isometric.

[RaNDoM]

If you have some money to spend, you can try Microsoft Visio, which has a very huge library of pre-made pieces.

[ras_maxim]

And if I haven't?  Well there's two ways  of creating isometric background:
1. draw it yourself. You have to be a very good artist. And then you need to draw a perfect isometric picture, or  rotate and scale every object and then merge all in one background bitmap. It isn't convinent 
2. Render a 3D scene. I've downloaded Blender 3d, but I still cant uerstand how does it work, maybe because of Mac interface. Do you any other free small 3d scene builders?

[Ozwalled]

There's the possibility of building isometric enviroments withing the latest RPG Maker (I have no idea what version it is -- I've never used it) and then just taking screenshots. I'm pretty sure it can be done, but I know nothing else about this.

[Flippy_D]

It's not too hard to do in paint, actually. Isometric is easy with computer accuracy.

[veryweirdguy]

You'd have to get the angle EXACTLY right though (the angle is 30 degrees from the horizon, if anyone's interested) & as far as I know there is no way to do this in Paint.

[YOke]

I haven't done much isometric stuff, but it occured to me that since 30 degrees is 1/3 of 90 degrees (duh...) the same ratio exists between horizontal and vertical pixels.

Example:

a 45 degree line from 90 degrees on the horizon:

*
  *
    *
      *

a 45 degree line from 30 degrees on the horizon:

***
      ***
            ***
                  ***

Am I totally off here?

[Ashen]

A useful little link from the tutorials thread:
http://www.zoggles.co.uk/asp/tutorials.asp?tut=1

With a little practice, isometric art is pretty easy, as Flippy said. I don't know about Paint, though, I prefer to be able to use layers.

[MrColossal]

hehe VWG... How is it impossible in paint? It's just pixels, baby

[veryweirdguy]

What I meant was that there was no way to know 100% for sure that your angle was 30 degrees in Paint, but then YOke had to go & be smart n stuff.........that's actually a good way of doing it. Go with that.

If anyone's interested, here's a little applet I found a while back that people might find useful for isometricising....or at least planning it:

http://illuminations.nctm.org/tools/isometric/isometric.asp

And once you see how easy it is, hey, pie might be considered difficult compared to this!

I mean, look at what I came up with in 5 minutes!:



And if that's 5 minutes, just THINK what you could do in 10!

[Kweepa]

That's a pretty cool applet!

Here's an isometric engine I wrote in java last year.
Sometimes it doesn't start up quite right - you might need to click in the window to give keyboard control to the applet. Also, it takes a while to load over the network so give it time.

http://kweepa.com/step/iso/Isometrix.html

You can pick stuff up, push things around, open doors with keys, turn on and off platforms with switches... for example, in the version up there, you have to get the key (the little block on the moving platform) to go through the door on the left.

Not completely relevant here, but what the heck.

There's also an editor but you can't save anything over the network - you'd have to download it locally.

Steve

[Losttraveler unlog]

Today in drafting we used isometric graphpaper, just make that a layer in graphics gale

[ras_maxim]

Thank you all for your replies 
Actually the angle has to be something like 26,56 because it is perfect and doesn't distort (because of pixel graphics)
2 Ozwalled: What RPGMaker are you talkin about? I have 2003 and its still top-down.

[Darth Mandarb]

I always thought it was for every 2 pixels left/right, you go up/down 1 pixel.Ã,  I thought that was isometric?

[][]
Ã,  Ã,  [][]
Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  [][]

But I must stress ... I'm a moron.

[Moox]

your right darth

[Kweepa]

Darth, that's the easy way to do isometric with pixels.
It doesn't match the technical drawing definition but it looks very similar and more importantly it looks good enough on screen.

[Ben]

Darth's way actually looks better than the technical-drawing way, since all the lines are at an angle which fit the pixels best.. Eh... It's hard to explain.. But at a true 30 degree angle the pixels look more "Jaggy".

[YOke]

Yeah, I checked the link Ashen posted, and it's two pixels, not three. But my reasoning was good...

[Ozwalled]

2 Ozwalled: What RPGMaker are you talkin about? I have 2003 and its still top-down.

I think it's called Network Rpg Maker. Or nrpgmaker. Or nedango.  I know very little about it, save for the fact that someone I knew was using it at one point and was telling me about it. Sorry I can't be more helpful.

You may also want to take a peek at this: http://www.techsoftuk.co.uk/2D.htm - 2d design.