HeroMachine Character Portrait Creator

Or are they walking legs? Either way, here's a quick screen grab of the legs I just added to the "BodyMaleStandard" set:

I spent the weekend ironing out a persistent and irritating bug that was preventing me from making item set selection easier. To reward myself for my virtuous persistence, today I am drawing. Specifically, I am following up on Kaldath's suggestion that I draw as many arm positions as possible in the "Body" sets to increase the flexibility of the character's position. To wit:

The body in the image is made up of seven different items -- torso, left & right upper arms, left & right forearms, and left & right legs. They've been layered, sized, and moved to create the given effect, along with one of the new RightHand items.

As you can see there are a few gaps in the lineart -- the figure's left elbow doesn't quite match up, and the left wrist is a bit choppy, but I don't think that's avoidable given how freely all these items can rotate and the need to account for one being layered on top of another. Luckily the "outline" feature hides a myriad of these sorts of sins.

Next I think I'll be working on more and alternate leg positions as well.

The drawback to all of this, of course, is that not all of the gloves are going to fit on that foreshortened forearm. And if I draw legs in the classic "flying guy" sort of pose (as I plan to), not all the pants or boots will fit either. But given that you can color the various body segments individually, it ought to be possible to make a pretty convincing body suit in any of these configurations regardless.

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.