[3D and Illustration] Making Game Tokens For Tabletop Simulator

As much as I would really like to get started on the next story/mission in 5150: Gaea's Worst, I'm going to need to prepare a few things in advance.

This is one of the drawbacks of playing a miniatures/map-directed game, and I believe that all GM's who have been around for a while know how this goes. You need to figure out what kind of terrain you're going to use, what kind of models you're going to use, consider whether or not you have all the things you need or whether you need to make them or acquire them…

There's a good reason that games run purely in the imagination have a certain advantage when it comes to the amount of work you need to do in downtime.

We have a few things that absolutely need to get done between now and next session, and one of those things is making useful tokens for the game board.

Let's go through that.

What We Need to End Up With

• The stats for the two mecha in question, translated from The Hungry into Hammer & Anvil compatible stat blocks.

• 3D models for the two mecha, done in Fusion 360 because the rendering is convenient.

• Making the chits in Adobe Illustrator for doing text for on-marker stats.

• Putting it all together in Tabletop Simulator

Stats

Mecha were first introduced to the current version of the THW 5150 series in the book 5150: No Quarter – Mecha Combat, which was an interesting translation of BattleTech-style mecha into what has essentially been an infantry-focused platoon-to-company level wargame. Those mecha had individual hit locations, locations where weapons were located and could be individually targeted, torso twisting (which the BattleTech-inspired will smile at), but no overheating – which is just fine with me. It also included a relatively lightweight construction system for making more mecha and vehicles, which is relatively unusual for the 5150 series.

The mechanics in The Hungry were derived from NQ to be compatible with the 5150: Star Army Second Tour mechanics, making use of the different kinds of infantry armor in the same way that vehicles in the original 5150: Star Army integrated.

Hammer & Anvil simplifies things down much more than I had anticipated, necessitating a bit of a change in how things get thought about.

Let's see what we've got and where to go from there.

Bullhorn

Here is the Bullhorn, the intended command mech for the mercenary platoon which will be providing heavy support to what remains of Gaea's Worst. Somehow we have to reduce seven hit locations into two, Front and Rear.

Name	REP	Speed	Class	Total Armour	Total Weapon Weight
Bullhorn	-	12	3	19	10 / 10

Armour	Head	Arm(L)	Arm(R)	Chest	Gut	Leg(L)	Leg(R)
-	4	1	1	4	3	3	3

Weapon Type	WV	Location	Range	Target	Impact	Notes
Beam, Light	1	Head	24	1	1
Beam, Heavy (x2)	6	Chest	24	1	4
Melee Weap	2	Leg(L)	-	-	-	Kick counts as 5 Armour on Melee Damage Table
EWS 1	1	Head	-	-	-	Count 1 success bonus on In Sight Test

SA Armour Type: Exo Armour (Exo)

Because NQ only has armor ratings, I originally assigned each mech an equivalent infantry armor type based on resistance, but that mapping isn't going to be particularly useful for us when turning things into HA stats. We need to look at the actual armor ratings and what they mean.

In NQ, damage is done with the classic 2d6 versus the Impact of the weapon. Successes passed end up removing Impact in armor from the location and go to the critical hit table when there is no more armor or if doubles are rolled. On the positive side, things are simpler in HA, where we only need to really check against the gunner's Reputation to find out if we have made a miss, solid, or glancing hit. Then we compare 2d6 versus the difference in the main weapons APR and the armor struck, to figure out penetration – and away we go.

The important thing to make note of is the difference between gun APR and armor, and recognizing that value is going to be between one and five most the time, if we can do damage at all, and that will translate into effect.

You would think that NQ and the mecha supplement for HA would cover the same mecha, at least providing a baseline translation for understanding systems.

Nope, you'd be wrong. The example mecha in HA are completely different designs from those in NQ. Given that my homegrown designs are even further different, I think we're just going to have to wing it here.

So let's work backwards.

The Bullhorn is intended to be a relatively lightly armored mech, intended to be piloted by commanders in the mercenary organization, lightly armored and armed to encourage them to avoid getting into combat directly. They have an EWS system which provides a +1 to Rep for In Sight Tests, which should help neutralize the minus one that all mecha get for being buttoned up all the time. It has a modified foot for use in close combat melee. We'll read that as giving a +1 Rep for melee combat.

In HA, a medium mech for the Free Companies has seven front armor and three rear armor with an APR of six. Because The Hungry have close ties to Gaea Prime, we'll consider taking the main gun off of the GP medium mech which has an APR of eight – but that feels way too heavy for a platform that is intended to suggest that the pilot try to stay out of direct combat. Maybe we'll go ahead and take the gun off of the Free Companies mech after all. That gives us a six APR, but unlike most of our competitors – we are packing a beam cannon which doesn't require reloading.

Mecha in HA don't get a bonus to moving on roads, so we only have one speed value and the Bullhorn does not have jump jets, so there's no need to make note of that. The average speed for mecha of this size is 15, except for most Free Company mechs where the default is 18 with jump jets. We'll split the difference, just a bit, and give the Bullhorn 16 but no jump jets. No one needs their leader drawing attention to them by flying his mech all around the map.

If we put it all together, we get…

Mech	Front	Rear	APR	MG	Speed
Bullhorn	7	3	6b	-	16

+1 Rep in Melee
+1 Rep for In Sight

Disturbance

The Disturbance, on the other hand, is intended to be a fairly hefty player. The second heaviest mech fielded by The Hungry, it carries quite a bit more weaponry along with its own EWS but no melee weapon. It's also slower than the Bullhorn, so at least command can keep up on the move.

Name	REP	Speed	Class	Total Armour	Total Weapon Weight
Disturbance	-	8	2	26	13 / 13

Armour	Head	Arm(L)	Arm(R)	Chest	Gut	Leg(L)	Leg(R)
-	3	3	3	6	5	3	3

Weapon Type	WV	Location	Range	Target	Impact	Notes
Beam, Heavy (x2)	6	Arm(R)	24	1	4
Beam, Heavy (x2)	6	Arm(L)	24	1	4
EWS 1	1	Head	-	-	-	Count 1 success bonus on In Sight Test

SA Armour Type: Battle Tactical Armour (BTA)

If we look at the HA Free Company mechs, we can see that their Assault class has a pretty hefty frontal armor of 14 and rear of seven. Their heavy has 10 and five, respectively. The latter has more room to put in the top-notch Hungry mech later, so we'll go with that. However, the weapon APR is sadly low at 10. We'll give it a bump up to 12 so it has a chance to do damage to a Hishen heavy mech, take the +1 Rep to In Sight Tests, make note that our main guns are beam weapons, and I think we have the stats worked out.

Mech	Front	Rear	APR	MG	Speed
Disturbance	10	5	12b	-	8

+1 Rep for In Sight

Models

All right, over to Fusion for the basics of making the models so that we can have some lovely chits on the actual game board. I find it much easier to build some low poly assets and use the renderer in Fusion to actually make the ship graphics than I do to sit down and try to sketch something out.

That I find a 3D modeling program a lot more direct and easier to deal with than a pencil says terrible things about me.

Legs

We'll start with a simple 20mm x 20mm square, just to build our bases off of. I rather prefer it when the shadows are baked in; it provides things a bit more pleasant overall tone.

We'll extrude it a very comfortable 1 mm and put a glossy yellow plastic texture on it, because I want to the Free Companies forces to be yellow to make them stand out from the blue and green chits that we already have.

Seriously, it should get more interesting from this point.

This actually looks a lot more complicated than it is.

The real secret to doing things like this is to realize that you are going to need organization. To get that organization you are going to want to use the components in the left-hand column. You'll notice that I have broken things down by:

• Chits
  • mecha
    • chicken legs

… Because I really want to make sure that I can use these components in the future when I make more chits. This way I get a nice, consistent look across the board.

Also note that I have an offset plane which is where I expect to put the body constructs. We know that we are just going to be looking down on this from above, so we don't need too much detail in the leg, but knowing where to put the body when we start to build it is going to be really handy.

The legs and feet themselves are just made from a few simple sketches and a couple of extrusions. If you see what looks like detail, it exists purely because I put a couple of chamfers on some edges, dragged them into positions that looked good, and went with it.

Sometimes the answer is to go with what is sensibly expedient.

I also only bothered to build one leg and used the mirror command to make the other. This is also a thing you probably want to get into the habit of, if only because if you decide to make something asymmetrical, it's way easier to simply mirror it and to maintain sketches on both sides.

Both mecha are going to use the same set of legs. If we find that we want some diversity in the look, we can end up scaling the legs to be smaller or larger, or moved closer to one another, offset – you can do all sorts of small things to your components that make visuals look different. And you very well may want to.

We are only going to be seeing these things from above and too much detail will be lost anyway. We want them to be readable from their visual profile. Simplicity is best.

Bullhorn

So what makes the Bullhorn visually distinctive? Looking at the original stats, it's that it has one heavy beam cannon on each arm and a light beam cannon in the head.

That's pretty good. We can work with that. There are a a lot of classic chicken leg designs which can come into play here.

We are just going to start with a very simple sketche on the plane that we've already defined. The body is going to be completely separate from the legs, at least at this point, so we can work without worrying about how strange things look in the end.

I think this needs a little more height, just in the middle, so I am going to do a bit of an inset or a line down the center and then loft the surface to that line, and we'll see how that looks.

This is the result of just doing a little bit of a loft on top to a single point and then going around with some chamfers and breaking some lines. It's amazing what you can do when you just sort of move around the model, pick some spaces, pick some lines, and perform some very basic actions on them.

For those of you who have watched my Onshape video, you know how much I talk about "feeling around" for the right thing. This is more of that. Just feel around on the model and it will sometimes tell you what it wants to be.

Right now, what we need are some arms, and we can probably build those from some very simple structures. Remember, we need to arms, with the one gun each, and one on the head. Do we want to replicate our gun designs? Probably not. We'll mirror the arm from one side of the other, which will reduce some of the work we need to do, and just put a nice gun mount on the head somewhere.

Some nice, simple laser cannons. I struggled for a moment to figure out what sort of thing would set a laser cannon apart from a projectile weapon, which is hard if you want the design to be readable from above and look different. I thought about the guns that I put on the tanks, and decided that muzzle brakes and the like were inappropriate. A nice tapered end with some sort of center post, on the other hand? That reads is relatively futuristic. Now I just need to put a mount for a lighter weapon somewhere in the head center.

And here we have what I think is a pretty good final design for the Bullhorn, which reflects the basic stats, looks readable from above (and you'll see that very shortly), and generally makes me feel pretty good about the design.

Let's get this into the renderer and take a look at how it works.

First off, we can definitely see there's a problem because the edge of that shit is not giving us enough space at the front and probably the sides to really do what we want. We're going to need to move things around just a little bit.

Overall, things look okay, though. I've picked a translucent plastic for the body of the mech, and the curves and facets are a little more visible than they would be with materials that didn't pass light through quite as aggressively. The feet are a little invisible underneath the body, but that's the way it goes sometimes.

Luckily, the size of the chit is set parametrically so we can easily increase that just by editing one place and one sketch. Everything else will follow on. I think this might suffice for the bullhorn.

This is extremely usable. With a slight change in lighting model, we get a little bit better outline appearing around the design itself while still getting that glossy, very plastic reflection from the overhead lights. The bottom is a little bit warmer in tone, which makes it pop a little bit against the structure. They're still getting some interior shading problems, but that's a rendering issue and not something that we really want to start dealing with today.

(For those who want the hard-core insider bits, it's because the Fusion renderer doesn't necessarily deal with internal light transmission very well. In theory, we could take this to Blender and force it to do something better – but this is well beyond good enough.)

Awesome! Next target!

Disturbance

The Disturbance is a larger mech, so we may end up moving the legs around in relation to the body. It's hard to decide at this point. I really like the chicken leg "sticking out to the side" look, but a lot of that is going to get obscured by the fact that we have large oblate bodies on top of them. It may not be the best combination.

Not only is the Disturbance a larger mech but it also has a larger loadout. Two heavy beam cannons on each arm but nothing mounted on the head or body.

I can see that I am going to need a consistent set of pieces going forward, so I'm actually going to start building beam cannons and assemblies off to the side of the original object and bring them in as I need. This is going to make designing things in the future with the same look a lot easier.

This is a pretty good go for a first pass, so will go on to turning off the old body and starting to tinker the Disturbance together.

This has a very interesting look to it.

I left the legs as designed, but the sketch for the body I ended up using a much more "airplane"-like with a pronounced delta. And then I just played with extruding the top and bottom with a taper angle rather than doing so afterwards with chamfers. You get some very different results by doing it that way. Some very different angles end up manifesting as planes get extended, and I rather like the result.

Rather than mounting the arms on the sides, I think I want to put the arms as extended turrets coming off the top. That will enhance the overall feeling of size and be a fairly unusual looking platform.

And here we have the assembled Disturbance. I think it actually turns out looking pretty good, all told. The premade dual heavy beam cannons look really good, everything is lined up, and it is an unusual design – so it will stand out on the field.

Let's go to the renderer!

The final render is pretty nice. We've got a bit of offset from the background thanks to the rendering errors – oddly enough. The shape is definitely unique and can be distinguished at range. There's enough room to put in the text. Generally, it looks pretty darn good.

I'm pretty happy to call that done.

Illustrator

Bullhorn Chit

Thankfully, things start getting easier at this point – or at least require somewhat less overhead to implement and demonstrate, which is great for me in the course of this post.

Putting the text onto the chits is just a matter of getting Illustrator up and running, getting the already created images into the system, and then deciding on font, color, and making sure that we have enough tokens with the right numbers on them.

There is a significant advantage to putting the stats for mecha on chits in HA, and that's the fact that walkers have fewer stats (and technically fewer weapons) than tanks do. They have less armor as well, meaning that the overall density of information is lower. It's important to note that the Hungry mecha are not equipped with and I infantry weapons of any sort. Their main guns also can't fire high explosive/area effect rounds like the tank cannons. Thus these guys are going to be a lot more dependent on infantry at providing them support against other infantry.

But hey, it's a mercenary company! They didn't plan on living forever!

Disturbance Chit

Once we had the Bullhorn done, it was a simple matter to swap out the art layer and run through the individual text bits in Illustrator to update with the new data. No problem at all.

Facing Arc

What's this "facing arc", I can hear you say?

Unlike tanks, mecha have an actual facing, targets within which trigger an in sight test but targets which appear out of the arc do not. Because the torso can be rotated in the direction different than the legs, it would really be convenient to be able to designate that.

Traditionally, this is done by putting together a miniature which twists at the waist – but we are not doing that. We're just going to make an nice, thick token which can lay on top of a chit and designate facing.

This is easy to do in Adobe Illustrator and Tabletop Simulator, because all I need to do is create the image and TS can import it as an actual token with thickness.

Luckily for all of us, that's extremely simple. There is a little bit of a question on how the border is going to import to TS, but we'll deal with that when we come to it. Which is about now!

Tabletop Simulator

Let's get these things on the table. At this point it's quite simple and there are only a few steps involved.

You can see I've already got a couple into the system, but let's get three of the larger mecha out on the table.

Firstly, make sure that you have the image that you want on the token on your system. Obviously I have all of ours, so this is going to be fairly straightforward.

Next, select Objects at the top of the screen. It's the icon of the Meeple. (Don't blame me, that's what they're called.)

Once you have components selected, click on the Custom button, and you should have an entire section of blank things that you can create.

We could make vertical chits which get put on the table as Figurines, and maybe that's a project for another day – but for now, we just want to literally left click drag one of the Token blanks onto the table and prepare to be amazed by the options that it provides.

All right, maybe "amazed" was overselling it a bit.

The important thing to note is that you can now choose an image, and you can do so by referring to a URL, if you have your images stored in something like Imgur or IPFS Pictures, both of which have a persistent existence – or you can leverage the cloud, in Steam storage. That's what I'm doing here because I want to be able to use these in multiplayer games.

Don't laugh, it could happen.

The big deal is that the token is way too big, but that's fine. Once you complete the import you can right-click on the token and Scale is one of the options that comes up. Click on the down arrow under Scale until the shadow of the token in question is the size you want. I'm going for a one unit token here, so it's a fair amount of clicking.

The advantage of bringing the image in at such a high resolution is that it looks damn fine. At no point does it start breaking up into rasterized pixels. Your concern about such things may differ from mine, and that's all right.

There they are, right on the table.

As always when you engage in a project, the review afterwards seems like a good idea.

In retrospect, I wish I had a little more contrast between the base of the token and the art. This will do and it will suffice, but more contrast would be better. Too much and it would start bleeding into the text, so there is definitely a middle ground to be held.

Otherwise, this looks like it was a total win.

Oh yes, the facing arc.

Not exactly what I was looking for.

It turns out that TS tokens must describe a convex shape, and a hole in the middle is not convex. This is still useful, interestingly enough, but maybe not for this particular purpose.

Ah well, you don't learn anything by succeeding all the time. Without a few failures you don't have the opportunity to learn from them.

Epilogue

Looks like we are all done, and we've achieved everything that we set out to. Stats for the mecha are neatly created and transcribed. Tokens, created. Everything put into Tabletop Simulator, completed.

That's a successful day.

The next time we play, I set up the table from scratch with randomly generated terrain in a Defensive Mission with the support of some off planet mercenaries! I am so ready.