Author Archives: AFDStudios

I am happy to announce that I’ve gotten the “widescreen” or “character preview” mode working in HeroMachine 3! Here’s a screen capture of a character in progress in the regular viewing mode:

And here is the same character with “widescreen” mode activated:

Thanks to everyone who kept reminding me about this feature, it’s actually pretty neat now that I see it in action.

I wanted to quickly highlight the “portrait view” feature of HM3. I thought it might be handy to be able to get a closer-up view of the head and shoulders of the character, like you’d see on most RPG sheets. So here’s a quickie I threw together just to illustrate what that looks like:

(Click to embiggen.)

At another suggestion from Kaldath, I have separate arm items turned so you can see the inside of the arm instead of the outside. This is to resolve the problem where some of the new hand positions just wouldn’t be anatomically possible with the arm in the default pose.

Anyway, there you have it. I’ll also still work on a “fullscreen” type of mode where all the controls get removed and you just have the character filling the whole area, so you can see those bits that might be chopped off by the edge of the screen.

I only have about a third of the slots filled with any sort of items at all, and the functionality is a bit hit-or-miss with lots of bugs and undesired behaviors, but … already this thing is pretty cool. I love the part in developing one of these applications where I’ve got enough features implemented and enough items ready that I can actually build something. So here he is, the very first character image generated by the early HeroMachine 3 software:

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