Interactive tabletop playing surface (Space Hulk Hobby Challenge)

If you search the Google Sketchup Warehouse for “Hirst Arts 302” you’ll find some kind soul has recreated the core Hirst Arts sci-fi range as a series of 3d models.

With a bit of jiggery-pokery, I managed to get these models into Blender. Then, after a crash course in how to use Blender (and £9.99 on the Udemy store for some video lessons) I discovered UV-unwrapping; after applying a few textures and copious amounts of copy-paste, I managed to recreate one of my own Space Hulk sections in Blender!

Unfortunately, my material texturing skill as about as poor as my Blender modelling skills and – although the result was quite pleasing, in that I could say “look what I made” – the end result was pretty underwhelming. What’s more, when I imported the model into Unity, it just looked weird and poorly made (which, let’s be honest, it is!)

So recreating digital versions of my Hirst Arts terrain is out (at least if I’m going to get anywhere near the deadline for the Space Hulk Challenge). Luckily, I had accesst to a top-down sci-fi environment I’d bought from the Asset Store a few years ago, when I first started playing about with Unity.

It looks great, has some amazing lighting and is made also entirely from “prefab” objects – doors and walls and floors that I can simply drag and drop into my own project to create rooms and corridors.

Now it’s not an easy job by any stretch, recreating an entire spaceship, even from prefab models, in Unity. But I figured I could give myself a day or so, to give it a go. So while I’m not going to get an exact facsimile of my tabletop game on the screen (much like the onscreen avatars don’t actually look like the miniatures on the board) hopefully the end result will be “close enough”.

At least close enough that each section is recognisable.

I’ve booked the day off work, I’ve got the coffee machine on permanent standby and about a dozen or so terrain pieces to turn into miniature digital works of art. Let’s see how we get on……..