For those curious about the tech behind the Electric Sheep’s WebFlock platform, here’s a glimpse from a comment posted on Clickable Culture:
…the avatars are typically created in Maya or Max but they are rendered into sprites. That doesn’t prevent avatars from being individually personalized, but we haven’t finished that capability yet in our feature set.
You can still have a very 3D feel with our rendering engine (less toylike than isometric in my opinion), but you don’t have full camera control. Personally, I think that is a feature you DON’T want right now (unless you are doing enterprise simulation/training or mirrorworld stuff) — if you’ve ever watched people try to learn the camera controls in your typical full-3D virtual world, it is sheer pain.
The environments are also created in Maya or Max and then exported to Collada.