HeroMachine Character Portrait Creator

Heromachine progression

1.

Your super-original plant-themed superhero Flower-Girl needs a picture. Decide to use Heromachine! Look at all the options, forget what you were doing and create a war robot with bear arms instead.

Remember what you were doing and start again with Flower-Girl. Use basic pose, skintight outfit. Face looks weird, but you can’t quite figure out why. Realize you can’t find a flower for her to hold, anywhere.

Get frustrated, ask for help on the Heromachine forums. Get five different options for making the flower, including one made entirely out of forearms. Also, they point out you forgot to add ears. Cry a little bit.

Make the flower, as basic as you can get. No forearms. Sigh in relief.

Weeks later, you’ve made Flower-Girl’s archnemesis Beeboy, best friend Tower-Girl and like ten members of her extended family. Realize you might have a problem.

2.

You revisit your original Flower-Girl design and figure you could do better. You try out some different arm positions, make up a new hairstyle by combining existing ones. Finally figure out how to make a character hold an item in their hand properly. Redesign the costume a little bit, use those new shoes that were added in the latest patch, even though they don’t perfectly fit with the original idea. Feel very proud of yourself, post it on the forums again. Get a positive response, but they point out that you forgot the ears again. Cry a little bit.

Fix the ears, AGAIN, also add a simple background.

3.

You look at Smitty’s gallery and finally begin to understand how he did those poses. Experiment. The result looks like a mutilated Barbie doll. Cry a little bit, start from scratch.

While researching posing, you also realize how shading works in Heromachine. You decide to try everything at once. The resulting pose is… anatomically correct, but awkward, and your shading is garish. Still, you learned something.

A week later, you remake Flower-Girl again and you find you’re actually pleased with the result. You remember the ears this time.

4.

You get frustrated with some item category in Heromachine and just start making your own stuff from bits and pieces. Who needs armor, when you can make your own out of shoulderpads and necklaces? Who needs noses when you can make your own out of geometrical shapes? You finally realize why all of your faces so far looked a little bit off and get angry at yourself. You remake all your old designs, including Flower-Girl’s grandma.

Also, you finally pull off a design with a good pose, beautiful color scheme, cool costume design and a nice background, all in one. It only took you ten hours and four restarts, but you did it.

5.

Newbies are asking you for advice now. You sweat nervously and hope they don’t notice how you use the same shortcuts in every design because you’re so focused on other, tiny details that most viewers will never notice anyway.

6.

Start making flowers out of forearms.

Thanks for the tip, dude. Unfortunately, I’m working from a mobile device and the capabilities are a bit limited compared to other platforms. I’ll see what I can do, though, I probably missed something. 🙂

By the way, I would recommend to save the pictures as png, because saving them als jpeg always messes with the sharpness and colours of the picture. 🙂

Hedgehog has me grinning. Awesome villain, really well thought out design and abilities, great concept

Alias: Helios
Real Name: Hal Hyatt
Genre: Superhero
Powers/Special Skills: none
Special Weapons/Tools/Armor: wears a technological suit that fires solar energy
Affiliations: The Olympians
Other Aliases: none
Status: active
Bio:
The year is 2056. The world is in a turmoil never before seen. The call was made for a new team of heroes, powerful beings who could smite the darkness with powerful fury. And thus were born the Olympians. Each wears a technologically advanced suit giving him or her vast powers. Together, they have joined the fray against the evil which has descended upon the Earth. Like the gods themselves, they now shine as our only beacon of hope…

Hal wears a suit that can emit solar energy capable of giving light or burning things. He represents the fierceness of the midday sun.

Pictures:

Really enjoy your costume designs, and the facial expressions are great!

Fantastic job on posing and scaling the hands on ‘Hectic’, looks just right.

Alias: Hedgehog
Real Name: Oliver Henry
Genre: Supervillain
Powers/Special Skills: mechanical genius
Special Weapons/Tools/Armor: suit grants burrowing ability, seismic ability, sonar ability, retractable quills, and can become a sphere
Affiliations: none
Other Aliases: none
Status: active
Bio:
Normally he is Oscar Henry, a mechanical engineer, but when the deeply rooted need for chaos ad destruction that have been with him since childhood rears its ugly head, Oscar puts on his Hedgehog suit and commences with the mayhem. His burrowing suit allows him to tunnel through any material quickly and safely, as well as create seismic activity in the ground in his vicinity. It also has a sonar device that helps him navigate in the darkness. The suit contains retractable spikes across its hide, and can even wrap fully around his body in a protective sphere. His lair is reported to be a cavern deep below the surface of the planet, though any attempts to locate it have been in vain.

Pictures:

Good job  on the different costumes for Arachnid, especially like the different insignias and colour schemes. Really gives the sense that he’s been a hero for a long time with several incarnations.

Great work.