Hey Everybody! I'm quite new to this Forum, but have been reading a lot of Resources from this page. So Big thanx to all Authors and Writers! :) Lately I've been digging into the idea of whipping up some funky isometric engine for flash/canvas just 4 the lulz of making one :) I've got the idea of using images to render a staggered isometric map down and have hacked together a prototype, that did this. Everything fine, including mousemapping and elevation of the tile itself etc. Where I begin to scratch my head is when I think about the approach of actually rendering a textured face (made of two triangles) in isometric. I've been googling like crazy over the past couple of xmas holidays to find some information about it. What I found was, that I'll be using some kind of Shear Tranformation to do orthographic projection (isometric) instead of perspective projection (3d). The rendering system I have is similar like flash canvas, where you can specify a transformation matrix by m11,m12,m21,m22,dx,dy Now the hardcore stuff comes; I want to be rendering terrain with a heightmap (stored in a matrix) in isometric (or orthographic) projection. I don't know how to start or where to look and how to take the transformation matrix in prospect to what I want to do... Firstly, does anybody understand wtf I'm even trying to do? ;) Secondly, does anybody know any kind of articles/books that discuss something in the direction of what I'm trying to wrap my head arround or a technical word, that I could continue googling about? Thank you for any helpful comment! Tschetsch

The right thing to do would be to search on isometric projection: here's what wikipedia is saying:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isometric_projection

The isometric projection is an parallel ortographic axonometric projection, this is the full classification from the most general to the most specific. So you might want to google those terms too. Here's another link:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1059200/true-isometric-projection-with-opengl

Just use the projection matrix for isometric projection and then draw everything as normal.

Hope this helps!

[Edited by - Deliverance on January 6, 2010 3:16:44 PM]