[Wargames 5150] Gaea's Worst: Building Mecha and AT (Pt IVb - Back to Illustrator and Fusion)

And his hair was perfect...

Yes, yes, I know. In the last post I had us perfectly poised to start the defensive mission, rush in from the ridge line, and sweep down across the concrete facilities to hold for five rounds until we could withdraw. It was going to be epic!

But the truth is that not having the tokens I wanted properly set up, sheets for the mech pilots, and the infantry squads not on the board bugged me immensely. So today is going to be all about getting those things put together and ready for the next session.

Mecha Figures

These should be sufficient for making stand up figures for use in Tabletop Simulator, but if we want a colored backdrop we are going to have to add on a little bit of something extra. And by that I mean plates which can be turned on and off which stand in front of and behind the back, so we can get a nice front and back shot.

This is so easy to do that I'm not even going to go through the step-by-step, but what I will be doing is creating a sketch on the forward square edge of the current bottom plate, giving it some thickness, making it the same color as the base, and doing exactly the same thing on the back.

This would also be an excellent time to change the color of the front, back, and bottom plates to actually provide a little contrast with the color of the mech itself.

In this case, that's as easy as hitting "a" in Fusion, going to the plate color that we have chosen, right clicking it and selecting Edit, then just playing with the color tones until something a little more contrasty jumps out at us.

There is, of course, an almost immediate problem. The mech isn't centered on the background. It's certainly a lot more visible, thanks to darkening and reddening that plate, but we need it to be roughly centered behind the piece so that we have room to add stats, and generally have the figure breathe a little.

We'll tinker around with the original sketches, add some different measurements, and see if we can't come away with what we want. Procedural modeling makes that much easier, since simply by changing the sketch and maybe a feature, everything else we've done that depends on those things gets updated naturally.

Disturbance

A little careful camera positioning, the slight change in lighting, and now we have something that looks really good and should be considerably more readable on the table. When we go into Illustrator to add the text, this should go quite nicely.

Now we need to do a backside shot, just in case the TS figure maker lets us do different and separate front and back side pieces, then we'll move on to the other model.

I call this one "I like Big Butts and I Cannot Lie".

Experienced 3D modeler's in the audience already know what the problem is, here. One of the things – one of the many things – that you will learn in the process of making 3D models for use in other sorts of media where you have to take screenshots or pictures of them is that all that crap photographers throw around in the course of talking about how cool the cameras are? Actually quite important. In this case, focal length. By default, the camera that I use in Fusion is pretty wide. That is, it's as if you took a large aperture camera and shot something from very close. There is a lot of distortion because of that position.

To fix this, I'll need to change the aperture of the camera in Fusion.

Pulling up the scene settings is easy enough, and the value that you want to start to play with is the Focal Length in the lower right-hand corner. Increasing it beyond 90 mm will make the lens more like a telephoto, putting the camera further back from the subject and making the lines a little more natural and less perspective-distorted. Reducing it below 90 mm will give you an even wider lens, which may be what you want if you would like a little bit of that fisheye affect to make something look really, really big.

I'm going all the way out to a 200 mm lens for this particular render because it will capture what I want it to. It may be that we don't use the shot at all, but better to have it and not want it than to want it and not have it.

(You're going to notice that is a common theme among a lot of my thinking.)

There, much better.

Should I want to go back to a more perspective distorted version for the next shot, I just have to remember to move the lens length back to 90 mm, and everything will look as though we are shooting it from quite close.

It's these little tricks that separate the experienced old hand from the neophyte every time.

Bullhorn

Now, let's do the other mech.

First the backside, and with the 120 mm lens that we used for the other mech. It's tempting to go ahead and center the image in the field, but the Bullhorn is a shorter mech than the Disturbance, and we want that to come across on the tabletop. I may actually end up trimming off part of the top that goes beyond this figure, just to emphasize that physically.

It's a little bit close to the sides when we take the lens back to 90 mm, and I might really want just a bit more room – but this should suffice.

Out of a sense of experimentation, however, I'm going to re-render this at 120 mm, but with no backplate, and being explicit about telling the system not to put a background on the image. We might end up with something that can stand alone on the battlefield, purely as the outline of the mech – but won't have room to put the stats right on the figure.

This might be a worthwhile experiment to make, and it's relatively easy to set up.

(PROTIP: When you go to render something with a transparent background, make sure you actually turn off the backdrop and don't leave it sitting there like a dumbass. Be unlike me.)

That looks pretty good. If the Figure interface actually trims off the alpha around an image in order to make its outline, that should look pretty cool.

Taking Them to TS

It turns out that as a figurine, this imports to TS without too much trouble. It's interesting that it gives you the option for both front and back, so I'm going to render a couple of backs and will go ahead and test out what happens if the front and back have a slightly different profile.

If that doesn't work, I have other cunning ideas.

You can't see this – and I might make some sort of fly around animated gif later to demonstrate it – but the front and back of this figurine is not perfectly symmetrical, but because TS knows from which side we are viewing it, regardless, it gets rendered facing whichever way is appropriate.

That is amazing. Let me set one of those up for the Disturbance.

Here's the table with the mecha figures set up in exactly where the original flat tokens were, facing the same direction. I think this will work out pretty well.

However, with the stats no longer on the chit, I'm going to have to make 3 x 5 cards for each of the mecha. I was going to have to do pilot cards anyway, so this is just fine. Rather than wasting already invested effort, I'll use the chip to mark the card associated with the mech in question.

Mech Sheets

Because the chits already exist, we can just enlarge them a little bit and leave them laying on the card rather than typing out all that information again. That saves us a few minutes. But now we need to do something a little more exciting.

These pilots aren't going to be Stars, but they are going to be unique characters, so I'm going to dip into 5150: No Quarter and generate their unique traits. Some of them may not be applicable, but at least will have a general idea of what's going on. They also need reputations, which I will likewise generate.

First up, Sgt Edgar "Coldheart" Winters in the Bullhorn. Because he's a Basic (read: human), he gets to roll twice on the Attribute list and keep whichever one he wants. The first roll is not so great, making him a Weakling in close combat. Not even particularly useful here. His second role gives him free choice of any of the Attributes, so I pick Resilient to give him the ability to ignore the first Reputation loss on a failed Piloting Test.

Winters has a reputation as a man who just will not stop. For terrain. If there's a building, he'll probably crash through the wall just for the fun of it. That doesn't make him incredibly popular with the higher-ups, but his men always seem to be amused by it. Maybe that's how we ended up in this shithole end of the galaxy.

Sgt Winters' XO in the lead Disturbance is Cpl Ali "Snipper" Laud, who very well may be just as big a hothead as Winters himself. Her favorite battle technique is to keep the pedal to the metal, keeping ahead of the Bullhorn for engagement with the enemy and never, ever slowing down.

Good thing she has the Attribute Crack Shot: Ignores the Fast Move penalty for the shooter and target when rolling on the Ranged Combat Table.

Last is the mercenary squad's rookie, Pvt Coi Ansharra, so green that he doesn't even have a nicknamed callsign yet. For now, his name might as well be "newbie" or "new guy". The kid's got potential, however. He's quick to react, well-trained, and like the sergeant Resilient. Maybe he'll even live.

AT Team Tokens

Since we do have some squishes on the field, it would seem like a good idea to have some sort of token to represent the antitank teams, especially since at least one of our named characters is in one. I could try to sculpt something which looks vaguely like a human figure, but that sounds like a bad idea.

If you'd ever seen my sculpting, you would understand – it's a terrible idea.

Instead, let's go look on Thingiverse for a soldier figure which will suffice for our purposes. AT teams are two figures, so we'll look for something that will suffice.

(If I were being a stickler for the rules I'd be forced to point out that these figures should be individually based, and armed – but I'm going to use a single token for both members of the team because, at some point, I'm going to field an entire infantry group for you guys and I want the flexibility of individual basing to jump out at you when I do.

This is a deliberate simplified stopgap.)

And we almost immediately find the only figure on the site with a rocket launcher. But that's fine, we can work with this. (Thanks Sarge00Seven!)

There's also a "sniper kneeling" figure alongside this which we can absolutely make use of for the second member of the team.

Both figures get downloaded as STL and pulled into Fusion for us to tinker with.

Well, that got – weird.

The first step was to snip off the round bases because those were simply unnecessary, and to do that the editing history for the entire file needed to be thrown out. Fusion is very strange about what it wants to do with editing meshes. It's great with geometry, but imported meshes get a little strange.

All that's really here is an extruded square underneath their feet, some lighting, and the exact same material that is on the mecha, but here it's rendering very strangely. It's a glossy, glassy, and funky. My suspicion is that because the scale of these figures is much larger than the mecha, we are seeing different translucency affects kicking in.

There's an easy test for this. Let's render them in something not translucent.

That is – not a lot better. In fact, not better at all. But because it failed, we know in general what the problem is.

Textures are applied to 3D models generally (though specifically in this case) by unwrapping the model onto a flat plane and then projecting the texture onto that plane, and then re-wrapping it up. Sometimes systems don't do a great job of that with meshes. With geometries, with volumes, it's much easier, but this smash is not being particularly well behaved. You can see where the ["normals"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_(geometry)) (the imaginary lines which point directly away from the surface at any given facet) are off scattered everywhere. Instead of forming a smooth surface, they're pretty horrible.

There's no easy fix for this problem. Rather than fix it, we'll just go with one of these renders, run it through Photoshop to trim off the invisible alpha masked pixels at the edges, and just use it to create a token regardless.

It'll be fine for our purposes.

(Now you know how grognards can end up with a closet full of 15 mm to 28 mm figures in various states of paint and assembly. There's just no end to it.)

On a whim, I checked whether the in canvas renderer had the same effect – and it doesn't! We'll go ahead and use this image to build our token out of, but I think we may have found a legitimate bug in the Fusion 360 rendering environment.

And you were here to see it!

This will work just fine indeed. I ran the last image through Photoshop, used at the magic wand to select everything that was that grey color with a relatively high tolerance (somewhere near 73), hit control-X on the selected space, then used the Image Trim tool to remove all but a couple of invisible pixels at the edges. This should work pretty well.

Next we go into Illustrator to put some stats on, and then into Tabletop Simulator it goes.

Out of Illustrator, things are looking pretty good. We have the cool "extending past of the base" effect going on. We have all the data that needs to be on the chit, including move, kind of armor, and the APR, and were ready to put it into TS and see what happens.

I'm so excited.

Here it is on the table, and as expected it will need a little bit of scaling to fit in with everything else – but it's pretty cool. Soldiers that run off the edge of the chit give it a very interesting style, and it definitely stands out on the table – so we're doing pretty well.

Epilogue

Things are looking much better than before.

We have actual mecha standing on the board with reasonable facing and individual sheets for the pilots, who all have at least one Attribute.

We have actual chits for the AT teams which look cool as Hell and stacked neatly underneath the APC when they're inside, letting me drag them around together until they dismount.

And we learned some new things about rendering in Fusion, what things work, what things don't necessarily, and ways to do some new effects. Though I am starting to believe that I need to seriously consider setting up a rendering environment in Blender because I'm running into a few limitations of the rendering in Fusion. I really want some more control of the ultimate lighting curves and such for individual images without having to take them into Photoshop along the way – and the compositing power of Blender is seldom spoken of but quite extensive.

Still, I don't think I have any excuse not to make the next post in Gaea's Worst the beginning of actual action – and possibly some truly terrifying moments to come.

This may not end well.

Games and Documents Referred To

Software Used or Referenced

Tabletop Simulator
Fusion 360
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Illustrator
Blender
Vivaldi - Seriously, without this thing and the ease of juggling tabs on multiple monitors, I'd never get one of these done.