February 1, 2008: This contest has ended, so comments on this post have been disabled.

After receiving a staggering 136 entries of exceptionally high quality and spending hours agonizing over them, I’ve settled on the top five finalists for the “Win a Free Character Portrait Contest”. You can see all 136 entries in this Picasa web album, and the 46 “Honorable Mentions” in this one. I’ll list the finalists after the jump.

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Kitbashing is the art of assembling your own action figure out of a combination of hand-made and store-bought accessories. Kind of like HeroMachine in non-digital three dimensions. A couple of Christmases ago I took a stab at it myself, following the advice of my friend The Evil DM. I started with a friend’s character, Pendragon:

I bought a bunch of action figure pieces (literally a bag of parts) from eBay, purchased fabric of the relevant colors, and acquired a package of Super Sculpy modeling clay for the helmet. After several weeks of work, three sculpted helmets exploded in the oven, and a new appreciation for the work of seamstresses everywhere, I ended up with a one of a kind action figure:

I’m a rank beginner, though, especially compared to the work of guys like The Evil DM:

And then there’s this guy, whose Gaslight Justice League I saw yesterday. Just unreal:

If you ever wanted to see the characters you’ve created in HeroMachine take life, you should try your hand at kitbashing. The worst that can happen is your mom yells at you for all the exploded Super Sculpy in her oven, and at best you develop a whole host of new uber-geek skills. And some really cool action figures.

(Pendragon illustration and character © John Hartwell, Hartwell Studio Works. Merchant action figure photograph © Jeff Mejia. Gaslight Justice League figures and photo © … ummm … the guy at this URL. Characters depicted in the Gaslight JLA image are © DC Comics, Inc.)

Browsing through the UGO HeroMachine forums, I’ve seen a number of “group shots”, characters all built around a common theme and then assembled together in Photoshop. But I think this trio from “Count Libido” (don’t let the name scare you, it’s all clean), called “Linkin Green”:

All of the Count’s character images are really well done, even stretching back to 2005 (!) and the earlier HM versions. Note in this Linkin Green group how well the color palettes match. They’re obviously three individuals, but just as clearly they’re part of a group, and it’s done by setting a simple four color palette and sticking with it. A common mistake when making characters is to load every color in the rainbow onto their outfits, but that just looks like a peacock exploded on them. Keep it to a tight group of colors like Count Libido and you’ll end up with a much better design.

One of the key advantages to using Flash as my illustration platform is that I can easily steal from myself. Take the example of Harry Kruger, NASA bigshot:

Harry is a character by Neil Ma from the Uberworld Play By eMail (PBeM) shared universe I’m involved with. Take special note of Harry’s face, because I chopped it up and put its pieces into the HeroMachine expansion.

I created the original set of facial features in HM2 by drawing the eyes, noses, mouths, eyebrows, and ears all separately. As a result, they don’t always look great put together. So with the Expansion, I took pre-existing faces (either from photo reference or from prior illustrations I’d done, like Harry) and cut up the individual features. That way, when they’re put together, you come out with a pleasing whole that fits. As an added bonus, they still look good mixed and matched, too, which is always nice.

This sort of thing is much more widespread than I think most people realize. It’s not a bad thing to recycle artwork you’ve used before, and having your originals available in a digital format (especially a lossless vector format) makes it that much easier. I’ve even duplicated entire figures as background elements for a different illustration, saving a ton of time and making the final result that much better.

So if you’re going to steal, kids, steal from yourself!

(Harry Kruger character © Neil Ma.)

Did you know you can type in your own letters in a variety of fonts to use as a logo for your HeroMachine character? After picking the body style you want, choose the “Insignia” component, then the “Text” genre of items. By default they all say “ABC”, but if you click on the actual item on the character, your cursor turns into a text-selection i-beam. Delete the default ABC and type in whatever you like, from numbers to letters.

On the UGO HeroMachine forums, for example, “monkeykid12″ has chosen a text font from the “Expansion1″ genre and created “High Five“, who probably won’t be a guest on an anti-drug “After School Special” any time soon, but who does look pretty neat:

It helps to choose a non-white color for the Insignia before selecting the font item to make it easier to see. Now get out there and make some heroes!

Pre-fab is good, but custom is better. At least, that’s what my home builder told me just before handing me his bill, but it’s just as true for super-heroes as it is for houses. As another example, from the pages of “Roll Call 06” by Oforie Murray, I give you Steven Warfield’s “The Hangman”. Steven’s initial proposal had this HeroMachine illustration:

When you’re doing a custom illustration for someone, the more detail you can get, the better, and Steven certainly came through. Here are the initial artist’s notes he sent in:

Artists Notes: So this is obviously a pretty generic bit of art (the piece I did up at HeroMachine), but I think that it gets across the idea of how I think that Hangman would look “in character.” As per his description, he wears the upper part of the bodysuit under any normal clothing (and would wear long sleeve shirts to accomplish that).
I am thinking maybe the smarmy overconfidence that Edward Norton displayed toward the end of Primal Fear for how he would look in the face (I would include a picture of what I am talking about, but as of yet cannot find any). I also think that it might be a good idea to have a “plainclothes” version of him in the foreground, with the elongated, masked version in the background/behind him rising up (to give an idea of how he gets away with his “dual existence” to some extent). If that is not possible, perhaps an “action shot” of him sloughing off his regular clothes and elongating out might be cool. As for his clothing - I am thinking some sort of body-suit that can stretch with him (to a degree). His hands would remain ungloved (so that he can feel what he is doing, both in terms of being more capable and also the thrill he gets from it). As for the mask, I think that a more elongated version of the one I have attached would be damn near perfect - and would give a chance to see the side that he doesn’t display when he is hunting to really come through (since you can still see his eyes and mouth).

After a few initial tries, eventually that first generic HeroMachine image turned into this:

Next week I’ll be announcing a special contest that will let you — yes, you there, in your pajamas! — try to get a custom illustration like this for your very own character, so be sure to check back then!

Thanks to Pesky for this characer, posted on the UGO Forums:

I think he uses transparency well here, making the green part of the wings look translucent, for example, without going quite too far. I also like the use of the new Expansion hover-platform beneath the character to ground it a bit more, and the diamond background gives it all the feeling of a real character illustration.

Nice job, Pesky, keep up the good work!

Over on the UGO Forums, “thedoompixel” has a thread showing off some characters he’s made. One in particular jumped out at me and I thought you might enjoy seeing what he’s done:

One of the things I like about this character is the way he’s made the “skin” component completely transparent, allowing the clothing items to take the weight of giving the figure form. I also like the clean and simple color palette, with just the eyes in a bold red against black and white. This is a really innovative design, an excellent example of “less is more”. You don’t have to load your character down with an item from every single component, sometimes (usually!) it’s better to rely on a few simple choices to carry the narrative forward.

There are several other characters in that thread that are well worth your time, so head on over and take a gander when you get a chance.

Well done, thedoompixel!

A friend of mine, “EvilDM” Jeff Mejia, created a role-playing game called “Legends of Steel” and asked me to do some character sketches for him. One of the characters was a pirate thief named Talena, and to show me what he wanted he sent me this HeroMachine image:

I took that and redrew it to look like this:

This is the kind of thing I’d like to do in the upcoming “Custom Character Portrait” contest, or whatever we end up calling it (suggestions more than welcome!). I think the original HM version is nice, and could even be used for a camera-ready, print-quality production if he wanted, but there’s just nothing like an actual illustration done by a pro.

Over the years I’ve had a couple of freelance clients send me images of a character from HeroMachine that they wanted to have in a custom illustration. Don’t get me wrong, HeroMachine is great for making “darn good” portraits, but there’s just nothing like a true, unique, professionally rendered image.

I thought it might be interesting to show you how the program can be used to give an artist a really good idea of what you’re looking for, though, so here’s one example of a character designed in HeroMachine, then rendered by hand. I give you Kubota, pint-sized (but deadly serious) soldier of fortune in the Star Frontiers game world (click on either image for a larger version):

I’ll be posting a few more of these over the next little while, the HeroMachine version first and then the custom illustration next. If anyone’s interested, I’ve also been thinking about having a contest. People would send me their HeroMachine creations, I’d pick, say, the five best, and then open it up to a vote. The winner would get a custom character portrait based on that visual.

If that sounds interesting, please leave a comment and let me know!