Monthly Archives: June 2009

Random Panel: Then can we frolic?

exciting-comics-5-1941-skip

(From "Exciting Comics" number 5, 1941,)

Character Contest 7: Spellslinger

Your challenge for this week is to design the best character that fits the concept of "Spellslinger". That may be a classic long-bearded fantasy wizard, or a magic-using robot, or a beguiling Fairy (no, Whit, you can't use any of the ones from the other contest, make some new ones!), or a teenaged warlock, or a be-robed cantripping chimp, or a post-apocalyptic biker witch, or something else no one in their right mind would ever think of. Just make it look good, make sense, and make it make me say "Cool!" when I look at it.

The rules are simple:

  1. All entries must be left as a comment to this post, consisting of whatever commentary you like and a link to the image hosted on a publicly-viewable website somewhere (i.e. ImageShack, the UGO Forums, PhotoBucket, Facebook, whatever);
  2. No manipulation in any image editor like Photoshop (except for cropping);
  3. You must use some version of HeroMachine (though frankly the HM3 Alpha probably gives you your best shot).

That's it! The contest winner will get to choose to have either a caricature of his/her face or an item of their choice included in the final HeroMachine 3 version for everlasting immortality (as opposed to that nasty short-term immortality). The contest is for one week, the winner to be announced next Tuesday.

Good luck everyone!

Character Contest 6 Winner

Many thanks to everyone who submitted one or more of the 70+ entries to Character Contest 6: Animalia! Before I announce the overall winner, I wanted to highlight those I thought were particularly deserving of an Honorable Mention for one reason or another.

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META: What’s the state of our union?

Here's the overall status of HeroMachine 3 as far as I know. Please let me know in comments where you think it is, where it needs to be, and what I ought to be doing next.

  1. I see the item population process as anywhere from a third to a half done. Almost all of the Standard sets are in, but I still have almost all of the non-Standard stuff to migrate. That's going to take a while.
  2. I am working on Neckwear now, with probably a quick dash into Sleeves to follow.
  3. Saving/Loading of characters is only minimally functional. Layer order is getting messed up on load, some items may be missing (although that might just be an artifact of the layering problem) on load, and the "Multiple/Single" setting for each slot is not reset, resulting in lots of confusion.
  4. Printing whenever you have a Hand loaded makes the character image occupy just a tiny corner of the resulting image. This makes saving as a JPG/PNG or printing fairly limited in value.
  5. The ability to specify a size when saving as a JPG/PNG would be very helpful.
  6. The program gets very slow, sometimes to the point of crashing, when a high number of items is loaded, particularly when patterning.

I think that hits the high priority stuff. I want to get Newckwear and Sleeves knocked out, then focus on the programming stuff again for a week or two.

I'd like to hear if that list seems right to you, what your specific experiences have been with it, and how you think the program's shaping up overall in a broader sense. Is it easy enough to figure out? Does it confuse you? What could be done at a higher level to make it all better? Has it met, exceeded, or fallen short of what you would want in a character creator?

Random Panel: I bet it’s that hot cape

exciting-comics-3-1944-excite

(From "Exciting Comics" number 3, 1944.)

(From "Blazing Comics" number 3, 1944.)

HM3: More shields

With many thanks to the commenters in the last post (Solander and RJCD particularly), I have just added nine new shields to HeroMachine 3 Alpha's ItemRightShields:

shields2

As usual, holler if there are any problems with it.

I now move on to Neckwear with all the great suggestions you guys gave. If you have more, post 'em here.

Click for the new DamienBlog!

I tried to auto-publish my newest blog on Sunday, and screwed it up. For those of you who needed help with Masking, or wanted to know how I did my apparently famous "Beast legs", just click here!
http://www.heromachine.com/2009/06/07/the-mechanics-of-creation-1-a-damienblog

Poll Position: Genre jumpers

I'm returning to the idea of cross-world/cross-genre cross-overs for this week's Poll Position, and the specific question is:

{democracy:86}

More after the jump.

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Random Panel: Meet “Kielbasa Karl”

startling-comics-5-1941-knockout

 

(From "Startling Comics" number 5, 1941.)

Random Panel: Suddenly TiVo’s a super power?

startling-comics-5-1941-tvbrain

(From "Startling Comics" number 5, 1941.)