Category Archives: HeroMachine 3

HM3: More rifles!

Mark has continued his great work on ItemRight-Rifles for HeroMachine 3, and I've posted the updated set! Here are a few words from the man himself.

Hi all! Hope you enjoy the new Rifles Set. I tried to include all of the most iconic rifles and sub-machine guns from history and fiction. You'll find the weapons that stormed the Bastille, the beaches of Normandy, the deserts of Kuwait and the terraforming colony on LV-426. Some weapons, like the ubiquitous MP-5, come in a million different configurations; where reasonable, I've tried to give you enough scopes, bi-pods, bayonets, retractable stocks and other accessories to customize each weapon just the way you want.

Now I'm not so arrogant as to think that I've included every long arm and accessory an HM3er could want, so I'm ready to take requests for the weapons I've missed. There are 92 items currently, and Jeff tells me that Flash starts to bog down if you get much past 100, so there's room for about a dozen more items. Make your requests here in the comments of this post.

But here's the thing--You know how Jeff wants reference pictures for items you request? I NEED reference pictures. And not just any picture, I need good resolution pics of the item flat-on the way it will appear in HM. I'm no artist like Jeff. At best, I'm a "graphics technician." For example, this image I can replicate. The rifle in this image I can not.

So if you can find me a good reference pic for a rifle, sub-machine gun or related accessory that you'd like me to add, post it here. I'll do my best to add the most popular requests.

Here's the set of 12 sci-fi rifles, which look GREAT, as a teaser:

Thanks to Mark for his as-always wonderful work on this.

HM3: Runic fonts

I've just added a "Fonts-Runic" set to HeroMachine 3 for your use in creating various magicky-looking bits. Most of these are just symbols, and only uppercase at that, so you might have to play around a bit to see all the permutations.

You can use these as a nameplate for the image; individual letters as insignia; sized and rotated for runic branding on weapons; individual letters rotated around for spell effects; masked onto skin as tattoos; or any one of a dozen other ways I am sure the creative community can devise.

Have fun!

HM3: Cape fronts

I am still plowing through HM2 sets that need to be converted to HeroMachine 3. I've just posted the new version of the old "Coats-CapeFronts" set, which can now be found in "ShoulderRight-Capes". Here they are:

Holler in the comments if you either see something wrong, or if there are specific items you'd like to see added. Requests with links to an image of what you want are the most helpful, but please make it specific -- if I want to do a Google Image Search for "Capes" or "Cloaks" so I can get twelve dozen pictures I will do so. Limit yourself to no more than three requests, otherwise I'm going to mentally mark it as "spam" and move on.

That sounds harsh. I don't mean it that way, it's just that sometimes too much is worse than nothing at all. So only request things you really want, I think I have a pretty solid set already and am not looking for general reference, just specific items likely to be of interest to lots of different people to flesh it out.

HM3: New chainmail pattern

I just updated the main HeroMachine 3 applet with a new pattern, meant to look a little more like chainmail:

It's the last pattern in the "Patterns" tab. Let me know if you would like any tweaks to it. I don't plan on adding any more patterns, each one increases the file size by 10% or so.

Nature Insignia update

With help from the nice commenters on the last post, I've added the following items to Insignia-Nature for HeroMachine 3. Thanks guys!

HM3: It's only natural

I'm happy to announce that the "Insignia-Nature" set of items for HeroMachine 3 is now live. In addition to almost three pages of nature-themed items from the Insignia-Standard set you've already seen, I've added another three pages of all-new entries as well:

Hope you like 'em! If you think I missed some items that ought to be there, or if you see a glitch of some sort, by all means let me know in the comments.

HeroMachine3 101, part 1

Hammerknight did a ton of work, putting together a "basics" guide on how to use HeroMachine 3 for the beginner. I'm going to break this up into several weeks, starting with a brief tour of the controls.

Thanks Hammerknight!

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HM3 Prize Items

I've been working on the backlog of contest prizes for the last week or so, and have a couple that I completed but forgot to post about. So here goes! These items are all now available in the HeroMachine 3 Alpha.

First, MartianBlue's great concept for a dragon helm, located in Headgear-Standard (Character Contest 34 - Cavalier!):

SpiderCow2010 requested a "generic city skyline" for the Background-Sky set for Character Contest 31 - Weapon:

I never heard back from TopHat about approving his prize for Caption Contest 70, so I am unilaterally declaring it done! For the life of me, I can't remember why I have the first glove you see but regardless, it's in now. Bonus! These are both in GloveLeft/Right-Standard:

Finally, Meg wanted a Kalidah from the "Wizard of Oz" books for her Caption Contest 35 victory, now in Companions-Standard:

For the next couple of days I will continue to work on prizes while Mark is fleshing out the Rifles set, and then I'll have to move on to the Mech Edition.

Congratulations again to all the winners, and thanks as well for coming up with these neat prize ideas in the first place, then waiting so patiently for me to get to them.

HM3: Companions-Humanoid

While rifling through old directories on the hard drive for a separate UGO request, I realized I have an awful lot of old drawings in Flash that could be used in HeroMachine 3. So I put together a "Companions-Humanoids" set for you:

I would imagine some of these can have other items applied to them for further customization, or you can just leave them as-is. For instance, with just a little positioning and scaling and layering you could do this "Charlie's Angels" remix:

Some of these are prizes from back when you got a custom illustration; if one is yours and you don't want it in HM3, just let me know.

Lots of new HM3 items

With profound thanks to Mark Shute, I'm happy to announce that his ItemRight-Rifles set is now live in HeroMachine 3 and ready for outfitting your various dinosaur marines. Woot! More to come in this set, but we didn't want to limit you unduly with the contest this week. Please do not make requests for Rifles yet, Mark wants a separate thread for that so he can keep track of it, once he's all done with the ones he's already got plans for.

Also, I've been working on prizes for past contests and have uploaded several, including the following:

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