You’ve always been able to import saved characters as additions to your current design, but once imported they were just a collection of items. You couldn’t affect them as a group, which made creating a multi-character scene extremely painful. It turned trying to make a Bulletman, Bulletgirl, and Bulletdog family portrait less of a Norman Rockwell cover and more of a Jackson Pollock painting.
No more!
I’ve just released the “Scene” feature, where you can choose to load saved characters as complete objects instead of as a collection of items. That means you can layer, drag, scale, and rotate them like you would a sword or a companion, and even change their transparency. This is a game-changer for creators wanting to put together complex scenes.
To load a character as an object you can use either of the load tabs. For files you’ve loaded before, there’s a new “obj” inline button:
And in the “Import Character” tab for new files it’s here:
Once you have the character on your canvas as an object and it’s selected, the behavior of the tabs changes a bit, since you can’t color or apply patterns to it. Instead you get these controls for the Transform tab, which mimic the standard ones:
And of course you can still also use the on-canvas mouse controls for scaling, transforming, and layering as well.
The big one here is the “Unpack” button, which does what you’d expect – if you have a character as an object selected and click this, it breaks the object back into individual editable items, right where you placed it.
This is the most ambitious new feature yet in HeroMachine 3 Phoenix Edition and I’m sure you’ll run into some bugs. Please let me know what you find, or what you think of it in general. I suspect the Power Users will get the most use out of it but hopefully it’s still accessible to the more casual folks as well.
Have fun creating and I hope you’ll share some of your Big Scenes either in the HeroMachine Creations FB group or in the forums!
