Some questions on isometric art?

[Cbaker]

Hi everyone, I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas.
 
I'm leading a small team working on a currently unannounced strategy game in the vein of the classic X-Com games. One of areas giving me the biggest headache is the isometric tile art, which seems to be done pretty much exclusively by pixel artists nowadays (as opposed to 3D graphics from an isometric view) so I thought you guys would be the best people to talk to about it.
 
I'm trying to work out how suitable isometric (pixel) art could be for my game. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the original X-Com, it came out about 15 years ago and looks like this : http://www.xcomhaven.com/images/ufo3.gif (apologies for the low quality image)
 
Unsurprisingly, we're looking for something a bit more up-to-date than this, but. Normal pixel art would not be well suited to what I'm looking for, as it's full of bright colours and is heavily stylised rather than realistic. However, terrain art such as is used in Laser Squad Nemesis (eg here and here) is more what we're looking for. Do you guys know anything about it? I take it that style of iso tile is painted rather than drawn pixel style? Is it difficult to do? Would an experienced pixel artist easily be able to convert their style to produce that kind of terrain, or are they very different in practice?
 
I know it's not necessarily your area of expertise, but it's very difficult to find information about isometric art as nowadays everything is just modelled up in 3d and displayed isometrically by the game engine (and that's not really an option for us as we're using a 2D engine). Any info that you guys can provide would be appreciated.

[NaCl]

I think what you're looking for is art made by a 3D program, then rendered in 2D at an isometric perspective. It appears that Laser Nemesis Squad is doing just that. I know that a lot of pre-3D engine games used this technique (Starcraft, Fallout, Age of Empires, etc...). It is especially potent because for an isometric sprite, it usually needs every single frame to be drawn in 8 directions if it's going to move around. When you create and animate a model in a 3D program, it is trivial to rotate it 8 directions and render it into 2D images. To make all that with pixel art would be a huge undertaking, to say the least.

[Cbaker]

Thanks for the input NaCl. We're already using the 3D method for the models/actors in game, this is more centred around the terrain. You're right about Fallout, certainly, but I'm fairly sure the Starcraft terrain wasn't done in 3D, was it? Was the terrain/buildings in AoE 1/2 done in 3D too?

http://games.softpedia.com/screenshots/3-740_1.jpg

I know the units/ships are 3D sprites there, but are the buildings/trees etc also in 3D there? I can't quite pick it myself.

[Lizzrd]

The buildings and trees are also 3D, yeh.

[Arne]

My current idea is to generate a sloppy 3D model, pose it in all positions, then simply draw over that. 3D looks a bit stale to me, pre-generated or not. Also, the grid based resolution and turn based nature of X-Com games doesn't really require the models to move and animate perfectly smoothly. It feels disjointed... a grid based TBS having very smoothly animated characters. I'd prefer to see jerky animation which matches the resolution of the grid, in a way.



I made some isometrical gfx for my LudumDare entry Legacy of HYDON. One thing which I discovered was that drawing a single frame is easy, drawing the same character consistently from several angles, takes a lot more time. A 3D model to work over would reduce time spent on... consistency-fying the frames significantly.