Workflow: Making a Board from an Image

Most board art starts life as a single flat picture. New ▾ ▸ Board from Image… 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, open New ▾ and choose Board from Image…, then 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 first time you use an image, DiceyTable asks where it came from (the same credit question every import asks); answer it, or cancel to go back to the board options with nothing written. The status line then 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.

From an image already in the project#

If the art is already in your project — imported earlier, or made in the image editor — right-click it in the Project pane and choose Create board from image…. The same dialog opens, and the board is built the same way, with two differences:

• No texture is added. The board's material uses the existing file as its texture, so the image bytes still exist once. That texture keeps the sampling settings it already had; if the board's rim shows a smear of the opposite edge, set both axes to clamp (see If it fails).
• You are not asked for a credit again when the image already has one — the generated model takes a copy of it. An image with no credit yet is asked about once, under its project path.

Definition of done#

Four items exist in your project:

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#

• The Asset Explorer — where New ▾ ▸ Board from Image… lives.
• Workflow: Importing a Model — for a board you modelled elsewhere.
• Assigning and Editing Materials.