Scanning loose counters

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GJK
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Scanning loose counters

Post by GJK »

Jerome or anybody with suggestions,

I just received a copy of "300: The Boardgame" seeing that it will be a fun game for me and my kids to play. I wanted to convert it to a ZT gamebox as well however, the round playing pieces (counters) all come loose from the manufacturer. They are double-sided as well. What will be the best (only?) solution as far as being able to get a clean front and back image of these? Will I just have to have two countersheets (one front, one back) and won't be able to flip the pieces since there is no realistic way that I'll get the two scans to line up together?

Any suggestions on how best to handle this are welcomed!

Edit: Well, I think one obvious solution will be to draw the mask and then cut/paste each side of each counter into the mask making a front and back and rotating/scaling as needed. Tedious, but that should do it and is probably the only solution. And no, it's not a generic back on the counters, they are true double sided. Thanks for any other suggestions though.
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Jerome
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Re: Scanning loose counters

Post by Jerome »

Hi!

Here is what I would do:
1 - Put all the counters on the glasspane of your scanner so you can scan all of them in one go. Because they are round you don't need to bother orientating each of them in exactly the same way.
2 - Scan the other side: flip each counter over on the glasspane and scan. It's OK if the counters are not exactly in the same location on the glasspane.
3 - Make a mask for each face : open the image in Photoshop (or another bitmap graphics editor with layers). Create a layer above your image. Fill it with black. Than set the transparency of the layer to 50% so you can see your image through the mask.
4 - Create round holes in your mask over each counter: create a round selection of exactly the same size as one of the counter, then move the selection over a counter, then press Delete to cut a hole in your mask. Using the same selection over and over, repeat the procedure for each counter.
5 - Finish your mask. Set the transparency of the mask layer to 100%. Replace the image layer with a white background. Save the resulting image as a PNG file.
6 - Enter the counter coordinates in game-box.xml. Make one counter section for each counter. To determine the location of each counter, make a square selection in Photoshop, just large enough to contain one counter, then move the selection over each counter and write down its coordinates. This last step is obviously a lot of work. You can spare yourself half of the work by using an Excel worksheet to compute the "right" and "bottom" coordinates based on the "left" and "top" coordinates (because the size of the counter sections is always the same). You can also ask Excel to format the text of each counter section line, so you'll just have to copy-paste the result into game-box.xml.
Jerome, ZunTzu developer.
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