Yearly Archives: 2011

Character Contest 58 Winners!

Many thanks to everyone who submitted an illustration for Character Contest 58: Simply Your Best. It was a real treat getting to see the pieces you feel the best about, and in my book your'e all winners already!

So while I'm obliged to pick out just a relative handful (and only one winner) from all of those submitted, I really think you all deserve a big round of applause. There was hardly a bad one in the entire bunch.

And now, on to the images!

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RP: Promises, promises

(From "Super Mystery Comics" number 5, 1940.)

WANTED! Creator Club

Hammerknight is looking to put together another poster featuring the folks who use HeroMachine to illustrate their imaginations, and asked me to put up this solicitation for the project. Looks like fun! See the poster itself for submission deadlines, details, etc.

RP: Porn parody or actual comic? You decide!

HM3: Wherein bugs are squashed and a question asked

With thanks to Panner and MMI, I've just updated the HeroMachine 3 Alpha with some more bug fixes:

  • The alpha transparency settings for all colors (especially color2) should now be working properly when you add additional items.
  • You can now switch on "Multiples", add two of the same item, switch to "Single", add a different item, and the previous items will correctly be removed without giving you "stuck" objects.
  • You can now drag items with the mouse wherever you want, even off-screen. Previously you were limited to dragging items only within the composition window.

Thanks to both of those folks for their excellent troubleshooting and bug reporting, it made squashing the bugs much much easier.

My question for you all regards automatic masking.

Currently, let's say you have one item (for example, a square insignia) masked to another (like a body). Here's how that looks:

But then you decide you want to add a second item from the same slot. In our example let's say we wanted to add the chevron insignia. We select "Multiples" in Insignia, then click the chevron. The old item, the square, becomes UNmasked from the body, and the new item, the chevron gets masked instead, like this:

The question is, when you add a second item from a given slot (like the chevron insignia), would you prefer that the masking on the previous item (the square insignia) stay applied? Or would you prefer to keep it like it is now, where masking transfers to the new item along with colors and such and the old item is unmasked?

Power User Profile: Kaldath

This week's "Power User Profile" features the winner of the first ever Friday Night Fights, Kaldath!
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Female wall-crawler

Kaldath was nice enough to put together a recipe for how to make a wall-crawling female in HeroMachine 3 for us. Perhaps the producers of "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" will notice and recast the lead ...

These are shown in order from left to right, top row first. Click on any one to see it at the original size. And be sure to thank Kaldath in the comments if you find this helpful!

RP: A “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” rewrite sneak preview!

(From "Planet Comics" number 1, 1940.)

Open Critique Day #12

It's time once again for another Open Critique Day!

If you have a HeroMachine illustration or another piece of artwork you've done that you'd like some help with, post a link to it in comments along with your thoughts on it -- what you think is working, what you're struggling with, etc. I will post my critique of the piece, hopefully giving some tips on how to improve it.

Of course everyone is welcome to post their critiques as well, keeping in mind the following rules:

  • Make sure your criticism is constructive. Just saying "This sucks" is both rude and unhelpful without giving specific reasons why you think it sucks and, ideally, some advice on how to make it better.
  • Each person should only post one illustration for critique to make sure everyone who wants feedback has a chance.
  • I will not critique characters entered in any currently running contest, as that doesn't seem fair to the other entrants. You can still post it if you like for the other visitors to critique, but I will not do so.

That's it! Hopefully we can get some good interaction going here and help everyone (me included!) learn a little bit today.

RP: The birth of Paradise Island

(From "Planet Comics" number 1, 1940.)