Smallcraft Assets
As I work on more ship designs for Traveller, I’ve come to need tokens for docked craft and vehicles in larger ships. So I’ve decided to split out my vehicle tokens from the other Dungeondraft asset packs. I don’t have many of these assets yet, but I have enough for what I need so far.
To be honest, the word ‘token’ is probably misleading, since they need to be at the 1sq:1.5m scale for Traveller. So even the small ‘smallcraft’ are several thousand pixels in size. For this reason, I’m not using the renders that I’ve done with Blender, but drawing simplified SVG versions of them so that they compress down to reasonable sizes.
I decided it would also be useful to have these tokens for use directly in a VTT, so they can be placed on a map and moved around. Since the originals are SVGs, it’s relatively trivial to convert them to PNGs. However, one nice thing that Dungeondraft does is allow you to colour assets. If an asset is drawn mostly in shades of red, it can be recoloured to any other colour scheme. I wasn’t quite certain how to do this easily outside of Dungeondraft.
So I ended up writing my own Go utility to try and mimic the Dungeondraft feature. This has allowed me to automatically generate tokens in a range of different colours. For example:
Adding more colours wouldn’t be too hard, but thirty seemed like a good place to start at.
Each token is rendered in several different scales – 256px, 128px, 100px and 70px. This should be enough variety to cover most map scales. Currently the zip file for all of them comes in at about 67MB.
Also included are actual tokens for use in space combat. Each craft is scaled to fit into a 256px token, with the scaling based on image size. Smaller ships will be smaller than larger ships. Note that the actual hull of the light fighter is considerably larger than the listed 10t – there’s a lot of ‘structure’ which doesn’t count towards the 10t.
Now that I can generate these with a single script, it shouldn’t be too difficult to publish new versions whenever I add new craft to the list of assets.
I plan to do tokens for all my Elite smallcraft, plus some from the core Traveller books. Some from the Deepnight campaign might be useful as well, but I need to draw them first.
The downloads for a zip file containing the latest set of tokens, plus the source code for the shader utility are below. The shader program will require compiling with the Golang compiler. This is left as an exercise for the reader.
These should be useful for what I want, if they’re useful for anyone else as well then great.
The same techniques should work for vehicles and larger space craft (with the caveat that these are truly massive in size).
