Feel free to use my screenshots and AAR to teach people. I don't mind at all! If it helps some people learn the game that's fantastic.
It's and edited through manipulating screenshots, but the workflow is pretty simple. You'll need to read up on various art programs to follow along if you have no experience with photoshop or gimp, but it's nothing too advanced.
- Take your screen shots of the area(s) you want to showcase. You can use the in game map export feature if you're trying to capture a large area.
- Bring in the images into an image editing program (I use GIMP, but anything with support for layers will do) and crop out the area you want + remove all of the background (the unrevealed tiles)
- Rotate the layer -45 degrees. You can also use 45, 135, or -135 depending on the orientation you want.
- Scale the layer. Keep the X axis (width) at 100% and scale the Y Axis (height) at 50%. Set Interpolation to None to prevent your program from trying to blur or smooth the scaling. Feel free to play around with other interpolation methods and see if you prefer them).
- The above two steps produces an isometric view of the specific layer. At this point it'll look like my screen shot. All you need to do then is arrange the image(s) how you want them.
- In my case I selected the visible part of the image (using the wand selection tool, but your approach may vary based on the program you are using) and gave them a border so they stood out.
- Then I took each image (each image being one z-level) and brought it into Inkscape so I could easily add the labels and lines.
- The tricky part is lining up each layer. If you draw a vertical line on top of everything and use that to line up the tiles it helps a lot. You can see with my stairs indicators that tiles above/below each other vertically stay that way in this perspective.
I hope that helps shine some light on my process! I don't really have time at the moment to do a detailed step by step tutorial, but that may not be a bad idea. All-in-all getting the images into an isometric view isn't that time consuming, but trying to arrange the various layers and what not can take some time depending on how much area you are dealing with and how detailed you want it.