Dicey Table

Workflow: Making a Board from an Image

Most board art starts life as a single flat picture. + New Board takes that picture and builds the four project items a real board needs, so you never have to model one: the art becomes a texture, the texture is wired into a material, the shape becomes a model (a generated .glb), and the three are bound together in a reusable prefab.

Steps#

  1. In the asset explorer, click + New Board and pick your image. PNG, JPEG, WebP, GIF, BMP and AVIF all work; only PNG and WebP carry the transparency that the cut-out mode needs.
  2. In the dialog, name the board. The name is used for the material, the prefab, and the generated model's filename.
  3. Choose a Shape:
    • Rectangle — a slab with the image's proportions. The art covers the top face; the rim and underside sample the image's own edge, so the board reads as printed on both sides rather than as a picture stuck to a blank block.
    • Cut out shape — traces the outline of everything in the image that is not transparent and extrudes that instead. Use it for a hex map, a track, an irregular player board, or any art whose silhouette is part of the design. Enclosed transparent areas become real holes through the board.
  4. For a cut-out, tune the two shape controls while watching the preview. The orange line is the outline that will be extruded; blue lines are holes that will be punched through.
    • Transparency threshold — how opaque a pixel must be to count as board. Raise it to shave off the soft, semi-transparent fringe an anti-aliased or feathered PNG carries.
    • Edge detail — how closely the outline follows the artwork. Fine hugs every curve and costs the most triangles; Blocky straightens it aggressively.
  5. Set the physical size. Longest side is measured in inches along the board's longer edge; the shorter edge follows from the image's aspect ratio, so a board can never come out stretched. The line beneath the fields shows the resulting footprint.
  6. Set the Thickness, also in inches. A typical folding game board is around 0.1″–0.2″.
  7. Click Create board. The status line reports the triangle count and confirms all four items were added.
  8. Open Project / Prefabs — the new board is selected there. Click Place to put a copy on the table; place it as many times as the game needs.

Definition of done#

Four items exist in your project:

Item Where it lands What it is
Texture Project / Textures Your image, converted to WebP by the standard import pipeline, with its sampling set to clamp on both axes.
Material Project / Materials A matte, non-metallic material with the texture in its diffuseMap slot.
Model Project / Models A generated .glb holding the board geometry, sized in real-world units.
Prefab Project / Prefabs A board piece that references the model and the material, locked by default.

Why four items instead of one baked model#

The art could have been baked into the .glb, and deliberately was not. Keeping the image in a project texture wired through a project material means you can restyle the board — swap the artwork, drop the gloss, tint it — by editing the material, with no regeneration and no re-placing. It also keeps the image bytes in your repo exactly once.

Editing a board afterwards#

  • Change the art — open the Material editor and point diffuseMap at a different texture, or open the Texture editor and edit the image in place. Every placed copy updates.
  • Change the surface finish — gloss, tint and the rest live on the material.
  • Change the collider — open the generated model in the Model editor. A board spawns with a fitted box collider, which is right for a rectangle and an approximation for a cut-out shape.
  • Change the size or the silhouette — these are baked into the geometry, so run + New Board again with different settings. The old items are left alone; delete them if the new board replaces them.

If it fails#

  • "No solid pixels were found at this transparency threshold." The image has no opaque pixels above the threshold you set — either lower the threshold, or the image has no alpha channel at all and you want Rectangle instead.
  • "N small pieces dropped as noise." The trace found specks too small to be real parts of the shape and discarded them. This is usually right for a JPEG-compressed or dithered source. If those specks were real, lower the transparency threshold or choose a finer edge detail.
  • The board's rim shows a smear of the opposite edge of the artwork. The texture's wrap mode has been changed from clamp back to repeat — set both axes back to clamp in the Texture editor.
  • The board renders as a plain box. The generated model has not resolved yet. It is a normal project asset, so it needs to be saved and (for other players) published like any other — see Where my files live.

See also#