New Thing: Scythe Popularity Token

I was very happy with the way the Scythe Power Tokens looked on the board, so I decided to round out my component upgrades with improved Popularity and Victory tokens as well!  I started with the Popularity tokens, which ended up looking pretty cool, too!

The first thing that I did was to make a heart.  I tried using the same Bezier curve technique that I used on the Power Tokens, but it didn't work out too well.  I made a decent enough looking heart and then was able to extrude it... but I wanted a smooth rounded heart, like you'd see in a Nintendo game, rather than a flat extrusion.  I'd been imagining that a Subdivision Surface modifier would create that effect, and it sortof did... but it also left all sorts of crazy artifacts around the edges that looked really bad.  So, I tried again.

This time, I tried a good old fashioned extruded cube with the Subvision Surface modifier on it.  To make my life easier, I moved one side's vertices to 0 on the X axis and then turned on the Mirror modifier, then I started moving edges around.  After a bit of futzing around with positioning and ring cuts (and the use of the Crease setting on a few edges), I had built a passable heart. 

That left me with the question of how I was going to get this thing onto the board.  After chatting about the design with my wife, we figured that it would look cool if the heart was supported by a ribbon, which could also serve as a stand.

A ribbon isn't all that different from a tentacle, and I do love making tentacular horrors!  Of course, I've gotten a lot better at making them since then, so I did it a bit differently.  In this case, I added a Nurbs Path by pressing Shift-a and going to Curves and selecting Path.  I then moved the vertices around until I'd created half of the draped ribbon look that I liked (I knew that I'd use the Mirror modifier to give me my other half later), then I went to add some geometry to it.





Instead of modeling geometry and bending it to my path (like I did for the Giant Viper), this was going to be a smooth ribbon.  So, I added a circle (shift-a > Curves -> Bezier Circle) and then edited it so that it was relatively flat (by selecting the vertices and scaling them inwards, as seen in the screenshot), so that I could use it as the cross-section of my ribbon.  I then selected my "ribbon path" and went to the Bevel section, where I selected my cross-section circle as the Bevel Object.  At that point, my "ribbon path" was now a flat ribbon, but I didn't like the angle of the ribbon at every point.  That was easy to fix by selecting each point and adjusting its Tilt in the data panel until the ribbon was aligned as I wanted (there's a lot going on in this screenshot, so I circled the bits that I talked about).

When I was happy with the shape of the ribbon, I removed the Mirror modifier, pressed alt-c and converted it to a mesh, then mirrored it again (so that it would hopefully merge the vertices at the joint) and then did some manual cleanup (there were some internal faces that I had to delete at the joint).  I then positioned my heart on the ribbon until it looked good... but then I realized that I had a problem.  The bottom tip of the heart was going to need support, but the ribbon was in the way.  I hate having support come off the top face of a model (due to the cleanup hassle) and I really wanted this to print with the bottom of the piece directly on the bed so that it'd be nice and flat, so I had to figure out a way to build some support into the model.  Enter the olive branch.

I figured that the popularity track is generally improved by peaceful actions, so adding some peace imagery to the token would both look good and give me some support.  I made a branch and a quick leaf through Subdiv cube extrusion techniques (it was going to be tiny, so I didn't worry about adding details like a vein), then put them together.  With my olive branch built, I positioned it so that it would go across the bottom of the heart and make that part printable.  Of course, that left me with some awkwardly protruding olive leaves... but they went out to the side and so were candidates for support trees!  At that point, it was just a matter of fine tuning leaf size and angle so that they'd be as strong as possible, and then I had a nice popularity token to print!