HeroMachine Character Portrait Creator

In the last two days I’ve made a ton of progress on adding more items to the upcoming Warrior Mini, including the Backplane, FacialHair, Shoulders, and Legwear slots. Here’s a quick character I whipped up just to try out some of the new Backplane items:

Things to note:

• The Backplane slot has a muscle-posed arm with no hand on it, which seems weird at first glance. I added it to the stage four times, flipping and rotating it, to get the extra limbs on this guy. I matched their color to the basic uniform to make it all look the same using the new Paintbrush tool. I added extra hands in the same way, rotating and moving them to fit on the ends of the arms. Doing it this way instead of how it is in the HM2 Expansion Pack lets you fit different hands on the arms for cooler effects. And, the hands themselves still have masks built into them, so you can stick extra weapons in them and they fit.
• The belt buckle is actually an Insignia, scaled down and moved lower.
• The robotic/mech Legwear item is Capri-pant length, ending at the calf. They weren’t quite long enough, and skin showed over the top of the Boots. So I just scaled the boots up until they matched, which you couldn’t do in previous HeroMachine versions.
• The vest Top turned out neat, using a light blue as the Line Color so the interior black showed through.
• The stubble beard’s color area was overlapping the line of the chin, making it look blobby and weird. So I Masked the stubble with the Head, and the lines now overwrite the color area of the stubble. That’ll make it possible for the stubble to fit on any of the Heads, no matter the shape of the jaw or chin.
• I was careful with the sunglasses (and the Headgear that has a glass front) to make the glass parts only affected by transparency. So in this case, you get the lenses see-through, but not the (admittedly very small) frames. This is important on helmets, because you might want to see through the colored glass but not the similarly-colored bits of the head cover part.
• I am having way more fun building this than ought to be legal.

Hope you like it! I am cranking along on this; I hope to have a testable version up this weekend, so be sure to check back for any announcement.

Here’s a screen grab showing the way the Insignia slot is really going to make some cool things possible:

I’ve chosen the banded shiny metal Top here to serve as the base. I selected a round Insignia, colored the outside orange and the inside light bronze. I checked the “Dupe” box, and added a chevron-shaped insignia, made both color areas orange, flipped it top to bottom, and scaled it narrower to fit inside the previous circle. I then set the outline of the chevron to 0% visibility, so I just had the color areas.

Finally I chose a square Insignia and sized it to fit the width of the character’s waist. I chose lighter and darker orange for the two colors, and changed the alpha for the inside color to 60%. I added the scale pattern to make it look like chain mail, and finally Masked it with the Top item, so you only see the Captain America-ish stomach band.

Pretty neat, ain’t it?!

I spent the day today programming in the “patterns” for use in the upcoming Warrior Mini. Here’s a screen shot of the ones I have so far:

If that’s hard to see, they are fishnet/diagonals; hexagons; scales; rivets; and camouflage. The camo in particular is pretty neat. All of the patterns are semi-transparent lines & shades of gray, so the color you pick for the item in question comes through and tints the line. That way you can have green jungle camo pants, or sandy desert camo pants, or snow white and gray camo pants, etc. One drawback to that is, you can’t directly change the color of the pattern, it relies on the color underneath it. So you can’t, for example, make the actual rivets a different color from the shirt they’re put on.

Another drawback is that you can either have the item serving as a mask or hosting a pattern, but not both. So for example, if you wanted the lightning bolts to be masked by the body (so you could get the off-shoulder look I had in a previous sample), you couldn’t do that AND have a pattern on the body too. Well, you probably could if you had two bodies, one regular with the pattern on it, and another turned to be invisible serving as the mask for the lightning bolts. I assume Kaldath et. al. will be plumbing the depths of these sorts of things and showing me things I didn’t think were possible 🙂

Anyway, I hope it’s a good feature that will make the applet all that much more useful and fun.

By all means, please feel free to suggest other patterns you’d like to see, I’ve got room for at least two more, and I can resize the buttons to fit in as many as seem worthwhile.