Similar to drawing the avatars, there are several ways to draw the isometric buildings. We can draw them in any graphical editing tool such as Photoshop or Flash. We can also model them in any 3D software.
When drawing in Flash, we often put some isometric tiles as a guide to keep the correct orthographic projection. The size of the building is based on the side length of the tile. A building can occupy a group of contiguous tiles. For example, a tree occupies a 1x1 tile of the map, a fountain occupies 3x3 tiles, and a building may occupy 2x5 tiles. The following graph shows a hand-drawn isometric tree in Flash with a tile as guide:
Another common method of drawing buildings is by using 3D modeling tools. Similar to creating the avatar graphics by 3D modeling tools, we can set up an orthographic camera in front of the buildings with the viewing angle matching the Flash virtual world. The advantage of using 3D modeling tools is that we can put texture on the...