Djuby is gonna kill me but the submissions for the Five Hundredth Edition of the CDS were so good, I couldn't pick just one. I am overjoyed at being reminded once again of the amazing talent and creativity you all have and which you share with everyone. Putting yourself out there is hard to do and I deeply appreciate every single person who took the time to submit their characters.
I picked out my absolute favorites and am adding them all to the Hall of Fame because they are all outstanding. I'll leave it to Djuby to pick one of these to do his own take on as the official prize, but I couldn't leave any of them out in good conscience.
Thank you again to all of you, not just the folks below, and not just everyone who entered this week, but to everyone who's been a part of this amazing community for so many years. It's hard to believe that more than twenty years have passed since the idea for HM first came to me. I never imagined I'd meet so many fantastic, gifted, passionate creators along the way. I'm truly humbled.
And special thanks of course to Djuby and to ALL the moderators here who have kept this place chugging along as I've uprooted my life time after time over the last seven or eight years. I've landed in Utah and am happy being a full time developer, but I'll always have a warm spot in my heart for HeroMachiners, and it's due to the mods that it is still going even in the face of the unstoppable Juggernaut that is Adobe shutting down Flash.
I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and that most of all, you keep finding ways to express your amazing creativity!
I really wasn’t expecting to see Pompeii up there ngl XD
Thanks for creating a fantastic program, I’ve had a lot of fun with it over the past year or so.
Additional thanks for including some of my creations in the Hall of Fame.
congrats everyone!
I’m going to echo Scott in thanking you Jeff, for creating HM. It has allowed the imagination to blossom. I Can draw…but it is painful after a bit, so having this program has allowed me to still “grow”, if that is the right word. Awesome job to ALL the Entrants! This was by far one of the best of what we as creators and what HM could create together. Congrats to all the Finalists!
Idk about yall, but looking through the accepted entries here, I feel like that my stuff almost doesn’t belong, all I have is a molten rock with a face XD, and everyone else has either these amazing designed oc’s with awesome effects, or super cool backgrounds that just make them pop even more
@David Bruce- Ok, so, I used to run the contests (did so for about 3/ 4 years) and I also ran a thing called Character of the Week, where I’d take a look at a picture that a random member of the community posted on the forums during that week, point out what worked about the picture, what cool techniques were used, so on and so forth. Personally, I’m not surprised at all that Jeff picked yours to be one of his winners, you would definately have been on my shortlist (after I’d paired down AMS’ million entries to just the one, dude was definately out there trying to win through sheer volume that;s for sure).
Personally, I’ve never seen someone mask the craggy rock body that well to that many different items. At first glance it was hard to tell if you had actually masked anything because the joins look basically non-existant, my mind just went “oh, must have just done a bit of hidden insignia masking to make the pose”. Then I looked a bit closer and saw the claw tech boots and it was a “I see what you did there” moment. After that I started to pick out things like the guantlets and the shoulder pauldrons. It’s legitimatelly a really cool design choice.
I also really like your colour work. Yes, other people have done shading to make their character pop, but by using a very light colour for the lines, yours doesn’t really need it. The character already has a glow from the contrast between the light lines and the two darker main colours. You have to be careful when using a line colour other than black, because it can end up overshadowing the other colours and making the image feel a bit too busy, but in this case it works. The one thing I will say could be improved on in this department is the flames, you went for a darker line here and I don’t think it quite works when the majority of the lines in the piece are lighter. However, I would like to also say that getting a good looking flame is very very hard in heromachine and I’ve never been able to do one I’ve liked (and the ones I have seen that looked good were very very shading intensive and can’t be bothers with that tbh).
So, yeah, just thought I’d add my thoughts, because I think you’re selling yourself a bit short there dude. Yes, the other entries were awesome, but yours definately deserved to be there.
Anyway, congrats to all the winners. Good job guys.
My Ultred is in. I’m so proud.