Author Archives: AFDStudios

I’ve just posted the various facial feature sets to the HeroMachine 3 Alpha. These include Eyes, Eyebrows, Mouth, Nose, and Ears. I ported over all the FaceMaker items, all the items from the Minis that made sense, and drew a bunch of new stuff based on the 2.x options. Of particular note, I tried to include at least one “manga-inspired” item in each set.

Here’s a quick look at the kind of head you can now put on your characters:

I used rotation on the eyebrows to make him look worried. And here’s the closest I could get in 2.x:

A few things to note:

• The Eyes, Eyebrows, and Ears are all split into matched pairs. This is a pain in the butt at the moment since there is no “keep pairs matched” feature. Yet. There will be, but item creation comes first. Until then, I admit that creating a good face is going to be irritating, as you add pairs and then have to delete the old ones. On the plus side, you can create some really cool looking faces.
• I have the Eyes classified as Skin for the purposes of the “Color all skin” feature. This isn’t ideal, as the iris color you choose is unlikely to be the same as the skin color on the rest of the body. Holler if you’d prefer the Eyes to not be so grouped.
• Ditto for the Eyebrows being classified as Hair for the purposes of “Color all hair”.
• Because Eyebrows don’t really lend themselves to two colors when each item is only one eyebrow, I instead basically used the secondary color to blob out a “brow ridge” area. In the limited playing around I did, I would bet you’re probably going to set that to the lighter of the two skin shades you choose, if you choose different skin tones. It makes kind of a nice outline effect.
• I need to figure out where to put freckles in … probably in Noses?

I’m very pleased with the way the various Facemaker bits have turned out when brought into the actual HeroMachine. I think breaking the eyes and eyebrows and ears out into separate left and right items is going to be helpful as well, allowing you to create a lot more emotion than you could in 2.x.

I’ll be spending the next couple of days adding in facial items I left out, based on your comments, so if you see something missing, let me know. Or if you think of something new, or see something broken. You know, the usual.

I’ll also probably be addressing the massive backlog of Caption Contest Prizes remaining to be completed. So yeah.

Hope you like the new stuff!