Monthly Archives: April 2009

I've updated Head-Animals, having dutifully removed the eyes from the poor critters contained therein. Shame on you people!

I couldn't bear to take the eyes out of the two Eagles, the Owl, and the Tiger. They were just too good. I'll bow to pressure if I must, but I defy you for now! ::shakes fist at the heavens::

It actually works pretty well. In a few cases, like the first Wolf, the eyes were the only color2, so I was able to reapply that somewhere else.

Tomorrow or the next day I'll add in some animalistic Eyes, like cats and serpents and such.

I added a few new Ears to the Standard set, including several intended to help make your own Headgears look right. Here's a sample character created with the new items added today:

The mask consists of one of the Standard Heads, colored green; four eyes, two of which act as the mask's eye holes (colored flesh tones), the other two of which are normal eyes layered on top; the circle Insignia, masked onto the Head and scaled horizontally to make it an arc and then colored flesh tones to make it look like the mask's mouth opening; two of the new ears, colored to look like regular ears covered in cloth; two Eyebrows, with the right one moved behind the eye openings so the second color gets clipped off rather than intruding over the mask's cutouts like the left one; and the rest of the normal facial features.

It's more cumbersome to do it this way, but man, you can get some really nice effects. I could use that same basic setup and swap out a triangle Insignia to serve as the mouth opening instead. Or use the Square Insignia masked to the Head to make it look like the mask cuts off at the forehead. Or or or ...

Yeah. Lots of possibilities. Have fun, holler if there's something not working right!

Oh, I did notice that using the Insignia for a mask mouth opening kind of screws you for using a nose ... I haven't thought through what to do about that.

I've just updated the "Standard" set of "Eyes" with four or five new entries meant to serve as eye holes for masks, either the ones in "Headgear Standard" or if you're using one of the basic Head shapes as a full-face mask. I've only played around with it a bit but you can get some really nice effects. Let me know if it's working for you, and if there are other shapes you would want to see.

I've just updated the HeroMachine 3 Alpha with the "Standard" set of "Headgear" items. I have some items to note after the jump.

Continue reading →

I've just published the "Animals" set of items for the "Head" slot in the HeroMachine 3 Alpha. I started out working on Headgear, but the first two items in it were animal heads and I realized that unlike in HM2, I now had an actual "Head" slot that could be filled with items. So now you can replace the default human head with animal ones. Down the road I may take the advice of someone in comments, and make some "blank" animal heads, outlines of feline and reptilian heads and such that can be filled with facial features just like the human ones. But for now this is just a replacement of the old HM2.x full head-covering stuff.

Here's a sample::

By way of comparison, here's a sample of the 2.x Animal Headgear items:

In general I tried to make the heads more realistic and more dynamic. Thus you have the screaming chimp instead of the placid looking fellow. I included suggestions from the comments a few days ago as well (notably the horse and dragon heads, for instance), but if you've always wanted some sort of human animal hybrid and don't see it in the complete set, let me know.

Also, note that you can use other items like the various horns from the "Ears" slot to add to these, making your own version. For instance, the more menacing male goat head I put in to replace the old friendly she-goat lacks horns. But you can add a couple from the Ears to complete it. Or you can add some of the animal ears if, for some reason, you wanted a bunny-goat beast. You get the idea.

Next, it's back to HeadgearStandard, and I'm still working off your list in the comments to that post.