Author Archives: AFDStudios

(Elemental contest winner "Fire Satyr" by Andre.)

I wanted to open it up a little to give you more creative freedom this time around, so your Character Design Challenge for this week is to come up with the coolest looking Nature-based character. Ideas that spring immediately to mind are druid or ranger types from fantasy games; weather-control steampunk scientists; lycanthropes or other animal-based human hybrids; elemental characters who control wind, fire, air, water, etc.; classic mythological nature spirits like dryads, fauns, satyrs, or wood nymphs; plant-control villains like Poison Ivy; and many many more that would never occur to me, I'm sure.

A character like Superman would not be a good entry because he's not tied to nature in any way. You could say that since Wonder Woman can fly on air currents she is related, but that would be incredibly lame and you would lose. Zatanna can affect nature with her magic, but that's more of a side-effect rather than the central organizing theme of the concept. Again, lame and a loser.

The Human Torch, on the other hand, would qualify, and certainly Storm from the X-Men or the Red Tornado from DC. You get the idea.

Here are the rules:

• All entries must be in JPG or PNG form (BMPs are too big), posted to a publicly accessible website (like ImageShack, PhotoBucket, the UGO Forums, whatever);
• Entries must be made as a comment or comments to this post, containing a link directly to the image and the character name;
• The image cannot have been used in any previous HeroMachine character design contest -- we had an "Elemental" contest and an "Animalia" contest a while back, for instance, and I don't want repeats of stuff you already did for those;
• Please name your files as [your name]-[character name].[file extension]. So DiCicatriz, for instance, would save his "Bayou Belle" character image as DiCicatriz-BayouBelle.png.
• If possible, please make the link go directly to the image (like this) and not to a hosting jump page (like this). If you see "preview" or "rotate" somewhere in the link you're probably doing it wrong.
• All entries must be in by next Monday, when I'll choose a winner, who will receive his or her choice of any item, or a portrait, to be included in the final HeroMachine 3 program.

The link location thing is really starting to be an issue as my internet connection continues to simultaneously both suck and blow, which ought to be impossible but isn't. When I have to load up the DeviantArt shell page to see your image, for instance, it takes a really long time. A couple of weeks ago it took me literally three hours to download just the first half of the entrants. I finally had to lug my wife's laptop to the town library and put them all on a flash drive. Painful. If I can just right-click on the link and save the image directly without having to load the jump page from the hosting site, at least I can queue them all up and walk away while it does its thing.

So yeah, I hate to be a hard-ass about this, but it's getting to that point. On DeviantArt, for example, there's a "Save This Image" button over on the right side of the screen, the URL that thing gives you is the one you ought to post. On PicasaWeb, you can right-click on the image and get "Copy Image Location" and again, that's what you'd want to post.

OK, enough scolding and rules, let's get creative! No limits on entries, so knock yourselves out, I'm really looking forward to this one.

Good luck and thanks in advance for sharing your imagination with the rest of us!

In honor of the Saturday "Things I Love" post I missed, we're having a pop quiz today: What does Jeff love?

The NFL!

Where do you come in?

It's the REAL pop quiz -- for today only, the best sports logo built with the HeroMachine wins a custom black and white character sketch by yours truly! It could be one (and ONLY one!) of your personal characters, or an established one, whatever you like, just like you walked up to a pro at a convention and paid for a sketch.

The rules are the same as for a regular contest, except for the time frame:

• All entries must be left as a comment (or comments) to this post and should include the full name of the team in question (i.e. "The Gotham Dark Knights");
• Entries must be in JPG or PNG format from any HeroMachine version (no editing in a third party program like PhotoShop, except basic cropping), posted as a link to the image on some publicly accessible web site (PhotoBucket, ImageShack, the UGO Forums, whatever);
• The contest will end at some point tonight, when I am taking a break from my massive orgy of NFL consumption;
• The goal is to design a logo for a fictional sports team, so you don't need to do a character wearing it, just the logo itself.

That's it, good luck everyone with our first ever one-day-only pop quiz! No limit on entries, so knock yourself out.