Hello there. I am an artist a little brainer towards technicalities. To create an Isometric map, my team generally paint each tile in photoshop but the end result looks too inorganic. I wonder there should be some way to paint a huge map in photoshop and slice into tiles for tile-set. Could you please help me with this?
Your question reminds me of this sad thread on the old Tiled mailing list, where somebody demonstrated that he had written a tool to do exactly that, but he never responded with the source code.
Right now Tiled can’t help you with this, but I could imagine shipping a little tool to do exactly that. Or to potentially even support using an imagine as a tileset directly with isometric shaped tiles, since that would be quite interesting from a texture memory and drawing overhead perspective. But that would be quite a big change.
In general, it’s just about making a mask image with sharp edges and using it to cut out the isometric shapes from your graphics. Though note that this is mostly interesting only for ground tiles, since stuff like trees and walls are easier to work with when they are not cut into diamond shapes.
I know this is an older thread, but I hope the bump is just a reminder that this feature is greatly sought after.
As a non-programmer, I have a tough time conceptualizing how to make an external tool to do this in Tiled. But really, and quite honestly, I am at the point where I would be willing to PayPal someone who could make the script necessary to make it work… It’s so sad that fellow pulled it off in 2012 but it never truly manifested…
Out of curiosity, supposing you did have a chance at developing such a script, what features would you envision to have in the tool, and how does the tool fit in any particular workflow?
For examples of what I mean
- I know that it is probably common-sense to expect the tool/script to accommodate different isometric tile resolutions, so the user must be able to input that.
- The tool may also feature a way to cut up any given images by a known number of iso tiles (assuming that the user has a properly sized image/canvas)
- The tool may feature wrapping so that the diamond iso tile that overflows from top/bottom/left/right edges are paired with its corresponding opposite half.
- Anti-aliasing / aliasing options
At its simplest these are the things that first come to mind. Are there any other ideas to add to that?
best,
lernie.
Yes, absolutely. All of these things.
Really, it would speed up workflow for me because I could sculpt an entire map in Blender, render in the appropriate aspect ratio, and break the render into tiles in the editor. Merely because of the design of my game, it would actually be easiest.
In addition, it would be great for the tool to discern the difference between the transparent and non-transparent sections of a PNG file, so it could rule out and discard unnecessary tiles. If you look at the link in Bjorn’s post, that fellow who made it in 2012 had the tool down perfectly. It just wasn’t submitted…
Edit: Like you said, specific resolution and/or pixel sizing options would be a must.
After almost an entire year, and two years after the creation of this thread, I’d like to bump it as a reminder that I still hope someone with the know-how can make a tool for this purpose…
Yeah, it is a matter of getting around to it… in the past year, I finished Tiled 1.1 which was mostly driven the Google Summer of Code students and now almost finished Tiled 1.2 which was mostly driven by priority requests from patrons (though the features are useful to many). And for Tiled 1.3 there are already often requested and very useful features planned as well (support for projects and scripting).
Of course, anybody is free to work on this!
There is also an issue about this regarding the same feature for hexagonal tiles.