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Decided to redo my catfolk Pathfinder character that I had made in Heromachine last year. You can still find in on the first page of this thread. The more I looked at the old image the more I grew to dislike it. I hated the pose, her expression didn’t convey her personality, she looked awkwardly “chunky”, and the shading was wacky. With this new version she looks much more natural. Like she’s just waiting by the city gates for a chance to cause some mischief.
Besides the pose, the shading is some of the best I’ve done. I was given the suggestion from AMS of adding patterns last, and then I go do the shading on my desktop instead of my laptop. Because of that I was really able to add detailing in the face.
Old Heromachine version of Straza made in 2009.
A remake of my lizardfolk character Straza. She’s my go-to when I feel the want to play anything reptile in games. Her design has changed a bunch over the years. The only things that have really remained constant is that she’s always a spell caster, wears no armor, and that I always try to stay away from the tribal look that gets dumped on lizardfolk a lot.
First sitting pose, yay!
Long post ahead. I decided to go through multiple hour the endeavor of trying to remake my avatar in Heromachine. First up I’ll post my hand drawn/computer colored version that I made back in 2013:
When I made it this had taken me 3 weeks of casual work to complete. I really like fire as an “element” and I’ve always had a thing for hybrid characters. So when I was designing her I was trying to decide if I wanted her to be a polymorphed dragon or a polymorphed phoenix. When I drew this I went for the dragon approach. So I gave her wings, horns, etc, and added small dragons onto her weapons. I was still torn between the two creatures though, so I also added feathers to her armor design so I could have a little phoenix too. Red and gold are my favorite colors so that explains the color palette.
Next up is my original Heromachine creation of her I did a in 2014:
At the time I was really happy with this. It wasn’t nearly as nice as the drawn version but I felt I had gotten as close to the original as I could. Over time though, as I got better at using Heromachine, I began to feel that this version was pretty lazy, not very nice to look at, and that it had a lot of missing details that I wish I had added to it.
So I elected to recreate it:
I wanted to make a version that was her pre-transformation into her hybrid state. I knew that the hybrid version would get busy by the time I was done. So I saved this to have a clean version with just the armor. Overall it’s a millions times better than the original. I was really happy that I didn’t ignore the details in her armor this time around. Comparing her to my drawn version I’m hard pressed to find even a piece of missing jewelry. I had to invert the pose a bit but hey, she has a pose now!
And here’s the final version. Like I said I knew it was going to get a bit busy. There are a few changes to her design vs my drawn version. Those are due to mental changes I’ve made over the years. One example are her arms which are now scaled. I wanted a more thorough “hybrid” feel and the wings and horns alone weren’t doing it for me. Instead of two rows of small horns on her head, four large ones also gave a better feeling. Last big change was the wings. Ultimately I decided to make her a “phoenix dragon”, so the wings changed color for a more fiery look and feathers were added. The only thing I really would have liked to tweak more would have been the shading in the wings. They kinda stick out in a way I’m not 100% happy with. Unfortunately, once I get to 100+ layers the app really starts to take a toll on my laptop. In the end though I love the result.
Loreley
Made for CDC #353: Mermaids – http://www.heromachine.com/2018/02/18/cdc-353-mermaids/#comment-121318
Been wanting to make a mermaid for a while now so it was pretty good timing on my part on swinging by the forums again. I went with a more siren approach taking inspiration from the song “Loreley” by Blackmore’s Night. I placed her laying next to the trench where all of here victims sink after being lured upon the rocks of her reef. Her custom tail was made drawing some imagery from lionfish. Their fins are super cool looking.
I won’t post any song lyrics here to prevent copyright issues but you can look them up here: https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/blackmoresnight/loreley.html if you want to see my inspiration. You can also look up the song on YouTube.
Edit: Winner of: http://www.heromachine.com/2018/02/25/cdc-353-mermaids-results/
The Phoenix Queen
This one started as just a desire to make a fancy dress but I ended up creating the whole picture instead. One of the things I don’t like about HeroMachine is the lazy coloring of anything in the “companions” tab. Most of them don’t look good if you just pick two colors and call it a day. I managed to make two decent looking phoenixes by masking a gradient in them and then adding wings and eyes on top for more color. The masking created the two horizontal lines stemming from her left arm though. Sometimes you can’t win.
Tiva – Old
Tiva, a human barbarian
Tiva is a former 3.5 D&D barbarian character of mine. After her clan to the north was decimated she became a travelling mercenary until she found a new home with a group of fame-seeking adventurers.
I wanted to play around with poses some more so I went for one where she’s going for a drop-attack. For the most part I liked her old outfit so I just tweaked some things like reducing the amount of straps, making a custom braid, and adding some tats and fur.
I remade her specifically for the Character Design Challenge #333: Triple Play! where she came in as the runner up.
The item locations for the contest are on the shoulder, face, and belt.
