Section 2: Preparing Paint.net
In the last section I provided you with a list of applications and links to their websites, I have chosen to use Paint.net so you will have to go to the website and download then install it.
Now that you have Paint.net installed we will need a couple of plugins before we continue, I say couple but there are three plugins that may interest you, one of which we will make a lot of use of, the others will be useful later in the tutorial. I will list them all here to get them out of the way now...
Plugins:
Grid Maker
http://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?/topic/4175-grid-maker-plugin/?hl=%2Bgrid %2Bmaker
I think that there are a few versions but this is the one I'm running with this tutorial.
Sprite Sheet Maker
http://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?/topic/14848-spritesheet-animation-plugin/?hl=%2Bgrid %2Bplugin
Well you can probably guess what this is for by the name =P
Now that you have those plugins, you need to install them and if you don't know how then go to the location you installed Paint.net, by default it will be...
"C:\Program Files\Paint.net"
Now locate the folder named "Effects" and this is where you want to place the downloaded .dll from the above links, once you do this you have successfully installed your downloaded plugins and are now ready to move on the the actual tutorial on creating Isometric tiles.
Note
An optional piece of software will be Tiled, I like to use this when testing all of my tile sprite sheets and you can also just have fun building with the tiles you create utilizing multiple layers and all of the other cool features it has to offer! Here is a link - http://sourceforge.net/projects/tiled/