(From “Master Comics” number 52, 1944.)
Posted in Uncategorized
I’ve just published the Heads-Aliens set of items for the HeroMachine 3 alpha. It includes many of the items you suggested in that last thread, so thank you! Solander in particular put up some electron microscope close-ups of real-life critters that worked out great, they’re towards the end.
The set is a mix of completely finished heads (like in Heads-Animals) and pieces that you can assemble with the “multiples” setting enabled for your own custom creation. I’ve also imported some alien-like items from Ears, Noses, and Mouths, along with some of the non-proprietary Lordi items you’ve not had til now. All in all this release has 58 items in it, out of which maybe 15 or so are repeats. I thought it was worth it to have similar items all in together.
Here’s a quick sneak preview of twelve of the new items at the top, and at the bottom are similar items from HeroMachine 2 for comparison’s sake:
Finally, in the course of basic testing I ended up putting together an entire character, which I hardly ever do any more. But since it does have one of the new Alien Head pieces (the lion-like snout), and since people for some reason (or hundreds of millions of reasons) want to build cat-like aliens, I decided to include it. Apologies to all the people who do waaaaay better putting these together than I do!
Let me know anything you’d like to see but don’t, bugs, or things you like in the comments.
And no, I haven’t 100% decided what to do next, so by all means feel free to lobby.
Posted in HeroMachine 3, Previews
I have to confess I don’t know what a Chibi is, but luckily for you, Hammerknight does! And he’s put together this very cool set of recipes for how to make your own with HeroMachine 3. Another masterful job by the Master Chef, thanks HK. Click on any page to see it in a larger, more legible size.
Posted in Recipes, Tips & Tricks
(From “Master Comics” number 51, 1944.)
Comments Off on RP: Scenes from Ian Fleming’s acid trip
Posted in Daily Random Panel
Although not technically a costume, I feel the following vehicle qualifies as fodder for Bad Costume Wednesday:
For those of you scoring at home, that’s an invisible submarine tank crawler. Because sometimes you want to be underwater, and sometimes you want to crawl along the ground, you always want to be invisible. Except for the bits inside, but come on, who is going to see you in your big scary black robe or, in the case of Wonder Woman, with your breasts barely contained in shiny red, blue, and gold, right?
Just because you can make it invisible, doesn’t make ugly go away.*
(From “America’s Greatest Comics” number 1, 1941.)
* This motto coming soon to an After School Special near you!
Posted in Bad Super Costumes
I spent a few minutes last night making a chart of all the HM2 slots and sets, mapped against which have already been converted and which have not. In general, here are the remaining major sets of items that need to be done:
Out of those, the easiest and most fun to do (for me) are the alien heads and the cape fronts. The hardest and least interesting (for me) is going to be rifles — they take a lot of work, they’re basically just tracings, and I am not personally interested in them. Don’t get me wrong, I like guns as much as the next guy, but it’s not a mainline interest for me.
The largest and most pressing need is obviously the Fantasy stuff, both armor and (to a lesser extent) casual wear. I think as it currently exists, the app is heavily tilted towards supers. Sci-Fi has a clear edge over fantasy now, too. I think that’s a major interest for a lot of people (me included) and needs to be fixed for me to feel like the item sets are close to done.
What really jumped out to me when I put the list together, though, is how much is already finished. I really don’t have much more to go, and that’s both exciting and scary. I can see wrapping up item creation in the next month or two, then it’ll be on to basically redoing the code base to work better and putting in the bells and whistles (better printing, better zooming, better control up front of item pre-sets so you can choose “dwarf male” for instance and it’ll load up a pre-generated, pre-loaded set of items that are already scaled and rotated and positioned to fit that body style. All that stuff.
But for now, I think I am going to do Alien heads, because that honestly sounds like the most fun. Let me know in comments a) if there are specific non-copyrighted heads you want and b) which other sets from the list you want me to work on next.
Posted in HeroMachine 3
I think it’s time we had a full-throated, two-page-spread, Image super-sized caption contest, complete with flying ponytails, ridiculous facial hair, unhinged jaws, incomprehensible female anatomy, outsized onomontoPOWia, no backgrounds, and all the rest of the high quality you’ve come to expect from the Nineties. Only one thing is missing — bad dialog! That’s where you come in. Whoever comes up for the best or funniest or most appropriate replacement dialog for this vintage Image Nineties panel wins either a portrait or any item of their choosing to be included with HeroMachine 3!
The rules are simple:
That’s it! Good luck everyone, and as usual I’ll announce the winner next Tuesday.
Of course, I can’t just let this go without a little gratuitous Image-Nineties-bashing. So skip this bit if you are sick of that kind of thing.
Posted in Challenges
Thanks to everyone who entered Character Contest 24: Super Enemies! Before I get into the Honorable Mentions and then the overall winner, I wanted to say a quick word to recap how I go about judging these things.
Note that the main criteria is “How good an illustration is this”, with “How well does it fit the contest theme” coming in second. The point is to make a good picture, of a cool character.
I struggle sometimes with how arbitrary it all is, and how it’s really just my own personal opinion, but there’s not much I can do about that and still have a timely event. And hey, it’s my site, so I get to be judge and jury, I reckon. That’s one reason I was keen on Friday Night Fights, it gives someone besides me the chance to decide what looks good.
Anyway, on to the results for this week!
Posted in Challenge Favorites, Challenges
With thanks to all the great suggestions in the last thread, I am happy to report that you can now use Backplane-Auras in the creation of your characters in HeroMachine 3. Here’s a preview of some of the new bits:
I tried for a mix of form-fitting ones with more general-area sorts of options. And even the form-fitting ones I tried to make blobby enough to work with most standard arms-down poses.
One warning, this is the largest set in terms of file-size in a while, clocking in at a hefty 1MB. I am not sure what kind of performance hit (if any) that will have on character creation, let me know if you see the app slow down markedly when auras are loaded.
Finally, I wanted to show you a quick sample of what can be done with layering, multiples, and alpha settings:
Let me know what I missed, what you like, what you want, and the secrets of the universe in comments. And thanks again for your suggestions, they really helped! Hopefully you’ll find most of them made it into the program.
Posted in HeroMachine 3
Three middle-aged nerds (including yours truly!) review all of the MCU movies in chronological order. Short, funny, and full of good vibes, check it out and let us know what you think!
Nerdmudgeon.com