Don't Roll a One

I’ve been messing with Foundry VTT recently. I like the level of control I have over it, but regardless of the virtual tabletop (VTT) I use, I run into the same problem:

I have all these miniatures but I can’t use them online. However, I also have Affinity Photo, a cellphone camera, and a habit of making unnecessary work for myself.

Look at This Photograph

I support top-down VTT tokens, and anyway, for this purpose it’s easier. Step 1 is to get some decent lighting (or crank up your camera exposure) and take a picture of your minis. I’ve found you can get a handful at once if you keep your camera a little farther away and zoom in. The parallax(?) is reduced with distance.

It’s important to have the bases in the shot, because they will help you scale your tokens correctly.

Hey Man Nice Shot

Next, I set up a token template in Affinity Photo. I use 400x400px at 72dpi. I add a 300px circle and mark the center of the document with guides, like this:

Bring your mini photo into this template and scale it so the miniature’s base lines up with the green circle. There should be enough empty space around the circle so any rifles or swords aren’t offscreen. You might have to tweak where the center of your token is if it’s oddly-shaped.

I also like to add an outline to help players pick out where the token is in the VTT.

I try to orient the picture so the mini’s face is at the center of the image. Next, I positively slather the image in filters.

• Brightness/Contrast to normalize the photo with the others I might be working on.
• As many Noise Reduction passes as it takes to smooth things out.
• Posterize doesn’t feel like it’d be a great move, but it lets me see where the blocks of color are and if the mini is going to be readable when very small. It’s not as drastic as, say, Pixelate.

I feel the final versions come out consistent, which is nice because I can adapt the same process for screenshots from Blender or other modeling software.