Category Archives: HeroMachine 3

I spent a few minutes last night making a chart of all the HM2 slots and sets, mapped against which have already been converted and which have not. In general, here are the remaining major sets of items that need to be done:

1. Cape fronts
2. Fantasy Armor (Tops, Legwear, Gloves, Boots, and Headgear)
3. Humanoid companions (would there be interest in having some of the Custom Illustration characters appear here? Like Celestia and the other full-figure ones?)
4. Alien heads
5. Two-handed firearms (rifles, laser cannon, etc.)
6. Non-human Limbs (more stretchy arms and legs, webbed hands, more monster legs like snakes and such);
7. Neckwear Collars
8. Bustiers
9. Musical items

Out of those, the easiest and most fun to do (for me) are the alien heads and the cape fronts. The hardest and least interesting (for me) is going to be rifles -- they take a lot of work, they're basically just tracings, and I am not personally interested in them. Don't get me wrong, I like guns as much as the next guy, but it's not a mainline interest for me.

The largest and most pressing need is obviously the Fantasy stuff, both armor and (to a lesser extent) casual wear. I think as it currently exists, the app is heavily tilted towards supers. Sci-Fi has a clear edge over fantasy now, too. I think that's a major interest for a lot of people (me included) and needs to be fixed for me to feel like the item sets are close to done.

What really jumped out to me when I put the list together, though, is how much is already finished. I really don't have much more to go, and that's both exciting and scary. I can see wrapping up item creation in the next month or two, then it'll be on to basically redoing the code base to work better and putting in the bells and whistles (better printing, better zooming, better control up front of item pre-sets so you can choose "dwarf male" for instance and it'll load up a pre-generated, pre-loaded set of items that are already scaled and rotated and positioned to fit that body style. All that stuff.

But for now, I think I am going to do Alien heads, because that honestly sounds like the most fun. Let me know in comments a) if there are specific non-copyrighted heads you want and b) which other sets from the list you want me to work on next.

With thanks to all the great suggestions in the last thread, I am happy to report that you can now use Backplane-Auras in the creation of your characters in HeroMachine 3. Here's a preview of some of the new bits:

I tried for a mix of form-fitting ones with more general-area sorts of options. And even the form-fitting ones I tried to make blobby enough to work with most standard arms-down poses.

One warning, this is the largest set in terms of file-size in a while, clocking in at a hefty 1MB. I am not sure what kind of performance hit (if any) that will have on character creation, let me know if you see the app slow down markedly when auras are loaded.

Finally, I wanted to show you a quick sample of what can be done with layering, multiples, and alpha settings:

Let me know what I missed, what you like, what you want, and the secrets of the universe in comments. And thanks again for your suggestions, they really helped! Hopefully you'll find most of them made it into the program.

I am finally going to work on the "Backplane-Aura" set of items for HeroMachine 3. I know some great ideas were suggested before, which I am going to try to incorporate, but by all means feel free to chime in here as well with anything you think I might miss, or that you want to make sure gets a hearing.

I've just posted the Tops-Female-Dresses and Legwear-Female-Dresses sets to the HeroMachine 3 Alpha. In general the Tops contain full dresses which are then broken down into just the tops in most cases, while the Legwear items are just the dress bottoms for the most part.

I included quite a few items from the requests you made in the last thread, thank you! Unfortunately a number of them were inappropriate or not suitable for this particular kind of application, but there are still a lot. Others you can craft by using a top with a different bottom. Hopefully you'll find what you were looking for, or can make it with strategic application of various other bits and masking.

Here are a few samples:

While there are a couple of bustier-type Tops here, for the most part a full set will have to wait for the translation of the dedicated Bustiers items from 2.5 on over to the new version. Keep in mind, though, this isn't "PornMachine", so don't get your hopes -- or whatever -- up too much.

Let me know in the comments what you think of the new release, any items you want to see added to them, or any problems you find. Also let me know what you'd like me to work on next.

Thanks everyone!