Creating Roll20 tokens using Hero Forge and Photopea - A Guide
So you’ve made a cool character for your next DnD game... but you don’t really feel like using one of the generic tokens from the various art libraries available on Roll20. This is where this guide comes in! I’m going to teach you how to make a passable token using minimal art skills andHero Forge, a website for creating custom miniatures. You’re also going to needthis template PSD.
Step 1: Design your character
Pretty straightforward. Create your character, put the clothes and equipment you want on him or her, until you’re satisfied with the look. I’m going to be using this character as an example:
Step 2: Pose!
So the important part here is obviously going to be to make your character look as good as possible from above. I’m going with a sneaking pose because it makes my guy lean forward in a nice and appealing way:
Step 3: Screenshot
Zoom in as far as you can on HeroForge without any parts of your character going off-screen - going closer will exaggerate the height of your character due to perspective distortion. I find it best to rotate so the character is facing to the right, but the direction doesn’t matter much as everything is on-screen. Click this button:
and download the resulting image. You should get a nice and transparent image that we’re going to use in the next step.Step 4: Photopea Setup
Open up the template PSD onPhotopea(Or alternatively, if you have access to it, use Photoshop!). You might have to zoom in to get a full size view (Ctrl and +). Next up, open up your .png that you got from Hero Forge, hit Ctrl+A to select all and then Ctrl+C to copy. Switch back to the HeroForgeToken.psd and hit Ctrl+V to paste to a new layer. Put one copy of this layer in each of the two folders named “Overlay copy” and “Multiply”.Make sure the Color Balance layers are above your image!Feel free to delete the layers named “Layer 0 copy” - they’re just there as examples. To duplicate your layer, you just right click it in the layer window and hit ‘Duplicate layer’.
Finally, we have to create a layer mask so you don’t paint outside your token. Ctrl-click on one of the two layers with your image in it to select the outline. Then select the “Colors Here” folder, and click on this icon at the bottom of the layer window to create a layer mask:
Step 5: Paint!
Start painting! Create new layers in the Paint folder and paint using the Brush tool with the colors you want on your character. The color picker in Photopea is a little limited, so if you want to reuse an old color I would suggest hiding the folders with your character image in it, so you don’t pick the color after it’s been modified by the shading.
Another tip is, if you’re unhappy with the color of a layer, you can press Ctrl+U to tweak the entire layers color.
Step 6: Shadow
I usually do this to my tokens to make them pop out a bit from the background - make a new layer outside and under the Colors Here folder, pick a large brush with 0% hardness and paint in some black under your character. Put more paint under the parts that are close to the ground. Adjust the opacity of the layer so the shadow isn’t too strong.
Step 7: Crop
Finally you’ll want to crop your image to get rid of any extra blank space outside your token. Just use the Crop Tool (hit C), and drag out a selection while holding Shift to keep it square. Once you’re happy with the crop, hit Enter to finalize. Be careful not to crop out any of your shadow from Step 6! Once we’re all done you should have an image that looks a little something like this:
After all this, you should have a passable token for use on Roll20. You can of course also use these steps on any image from Hero Forge, so for example to create a portrait of your character, like so:
Thanks for reading and may all your dice land on 20! -@Hideous_