Tokens for VTTs, Part 2

In my first entry in what apparently is a series now, I explored some ways to turn photos of gaming miniatures into consistent virtual tabletop (VTT) tokens. I’ve updated my workflow after discovering some plugins for Affinity Photo and have shifted from photography to Heroforge.

GMIC

The GMIC suite of image editing tools has a plugin that works with Affinity Photo. One of these filters is a “Comic Book” filter that results in a very nice line art style that matches the hand-drawn assets I’ve been making for Dungeondraft.

The output looks better and is easier than my original process, where I’d run photos through multiple layers and adjustments.

Heroforge

Part of the reason I moved over to Heroforge for these tokens is convenience. It’s easier than messing with actual pictures, and I don’t have a great setup for macrophotography.

I don’t think this is a secret to anyone, but you can make VTT tokens from Heroforge models without a subscription. You just have to do some manual cleanup and background removal. Affinity Photo’s Selection Brush tool makes this easy.

Scaling and Consistency

Because this is a manual process, it’s important to set up some guardrails and guidelines. I use a 400x400px template with a 300px diameter circular guide. I scale the Heroforge screenshot’s base to the circular guide, ensuring that each token should be to scale with each other.

Step By Step

Scroll through the gallery to see each step in this process.

Make your subject in Heroforge

Angle so you have a nice top-down view and take a screenshot

Here you can see the screenshot overlaid with the 300px guide

Resize the image so its base fits the guide

Use the Selection Brush (or your tool of choice) to remove everything BUT your subject

These are the GMIC settings I use

This filter doesn’t retain transparency, so make sure you run GMIC on a COPY of your token layer

It’s easy to use your original layer to create a selection mask and remove the black background GMIC made

I like to add a 5px outline to finish things off

Foundry Token Settings

In Foundry VTT, I also set the token scaling to 1.3. I use custom dynamic rings to add a drop shadow, and those I leave scaled to 1.0.

Why scale to 1.3? It’s because Foundry fits your source image into its grid squares, and our source images are all 400x400px but our “miniatures” are scaled as though they are 300×300. We do this so longer weapons and expressive poses aren’t cropped, but if we don’t scale our tokens up, there’ll be a lot of wasted space. 400/300 is 1.3 repeating, so we match that with Foundry’s token settings. Now, all our tokens are sized so their 300×300 bases match a Foundry grid square.