This has been a source of great frustration for me, what is the right method and tools to create isometric artwork for the RPG's I will hopefully some day create? It's a subject I keep coming back to over and over again.
What is the right tool for me? The perfect tool for someone else might be a terrible tool for me so here is a run down of things I looked at and my comments about them.
Blender - A good, solid solution to make isometric graphics. You can save camera angles, it has a large community, I've never heard anything bad about Blender. The only issue I had, and I heard this repeated a few times, Blender isn't the easiest 3D modeller to learn.
World Creator 2.5 - It's kind of obscure and the community is very small. It's been my limited experience that the creators are very passionate and very attentive to the user needs. This is a viable option for a non-artist a good way to create old school looking graphics. The drawbacks is the software, as far as I can tell, rarely gets updated and the community is very small. While in some respects it's a time saver to use it to create isometric graphics, from my limited knowledge, you have to hand edit (pixel by pixel) png files to create objects so in the long run it might be very time consuming.
Hexagon by Daz3D - I didn't do a lot of research into it but it doesn't appear to be a good tool for isometric art. I posted a few threads and it doesn't have much support in the way for isometric rendering.
Sketchup - Somewhat simple to use with not a lot of confusing options for someone not so smart such as myself. I explored this a while back and got some really screwed up isometric walls that didn't match and instantly dismissed it. Dumb on my part because I should have investigated it some more and posted on some forums. I discovered that with the isometric view you have to change the camera option. As a recent experiment, I created a couple of simple walls and they matched perfectly when placed side by side.
So I think I'm going to use Sketchup to create the graphics for my RPG. It has some built in isometric support, it doesn't have a mind numbing amount of options like Blender and it's free. For a while I was heavily leaning towards World Creator 2.5 but Sketchup offers one thing that WC doesn't - The ability to create a variety of objects quickly. With it I can create furniture, computers, doors, windows, rubble, sidewalks and any object I can imagine with a minimal time investment. Sure, I might be eating these words in a few months but we'll see! Also, a recent problem I ran into, the angle of some test walls and floors I created didn't match up. It was probably an error somewhere on my part but it bothered me.
I hope to create a isometric grid where one graphic fits snugly into one tile for AStar navigation purposes. When I created a test wall and floor with Sketchup the angles were a perfect match so it's alot easier to create a grid around that. This has been a pain in my gut for sometime now. It was either create the art mostly myself or outsource it, but let's face it, for some old school graphics why pay good money to have someone else make it?
Next up, the importance of starting game development with a good editor.
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