Category Archives: News & Updates

I'm not able to post it, but I have taken your suggestions to heart and made a change to the Warrior Mini code base (which will also work for the Horror Mini and HM3). The "Dupe" setting is now slot-specific instead of being global. In other words, you can have "Body" and "LeftHand" set to Dupe, "LeftItem" and "Belt" set to No Dupe, and those settings will stay as you switch around to the different slots.

I also updated the code for the Preview section, so the previous button actually goes back one screen instead of going to the Next screen. I've got a slider button in there too that changes size and position based on the number of screens in that slot's Previews so you have a better idea of which set of items you're considering:

Not sure if those updates will make it to the launch version, though I certainly hope they do. I kind of missed the "final code deadline", but if we're lucky UGO will slip them in anyway.

"So Jeff," I hear you asking out there in Internetland, "just what the heck are you doing with your time, since clearly you are not bringing teh funnah on such a regular basis the last two weeks and the Warrior Mini is pretty much done?" To which I reply, "Why am I hearing voices in my head again, did I not take my lithium?"

Seriously, joking about mental illness is not funny, I regret that last sentence and refer you to my many other substantive, caring, mature posts dealing with such weighty matters as cabbages, thinly veiled penis jokes, and vaguely homoerotic spandex fetishes, not to mention the thousands of words I have penned regarding the pressing scatological issues of our time.

To answer your impertinent and personal questions, however, the fact is that I have been spending night and day for the last two weeks drawing skulls, bones, horns, pulsating skinless muscles, spike-clad leather pants, and much more, all in service to a new client-sponsored top secret HeroMachine Mini I like to call ... "Mini Horror!"

Hmm, that doesn't spawn the sort of bone-chilling dread I'd hoped. I instead have flashes of Mini-Me in latex cracking a whip at me, which results in giggles. Not at al the effect I was going for. I think instead I'll settle on "HeroMachine Horror Edition" instead, at least it sounds somewhat professional.

I'll post some sample images below the fold, and if you have any particularly gruesome or morbidly fantastic items you've always wanted to see in a HeroMachine version, speak now or forever hold your severed head. Or whatever.

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I've put up a second version of the beta, with a major layout changes and 11 new Body parts for a bit of pose-customization. Let me know your thoughts in the comments to this post; I'm headed out of town in a bit but will be back on Sunday."> another iteration of the Warrior Mini. The two big changes are, first, a new layout to accomodate a 300x250 ad. I fought this, but it's a client demand and there's not much I can do about it. I tried to put the ad at the lower right, so the workflow wouldn't be as disturbed, but was rebuffed. C'est la vie.

The second is the addition of eleven new Body items, including arms, legs, feet, chest muscles, etc. so you can hopefully repose the figure a bit. It's kind of clunky, but it definitely expands the range of possibilities significantly. Let me know what you think. I hate dumping this on you and then leaving town for a day, but at least if you hate it you still have the old one to tinker with 🙂

I'm finally releasing the early Beta of the HeroMachine Warrior Mini for you all to play around with. You can find the page here; I hope you'll let me know what you think of it, preferably in the comments to this post, but the site's Contact Us form and my email are also fine.

It's going to be buggy, so don't be shy about letting me know what you find broken or what you'd like to see work better. Let me know if something is confusing, or doesn't work how you'd expect it to, or if something strikes you as counter-intuitive, or pretty much anything else you think about it.

Hope you all like it!

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.

Nothing fancy, but I put the faces in tonight and wanted to see how they came out. The hair got done this morning, and that Top was completed last night. Pretty fun to play with. Hope you're having a fun Halloween dressing yourself up for real tonight!

I've been hard at work all week getting the new HM Mini (Modern Warrior) coded, and it's going really well. It's funny, I get the same glow from figuring out how to make something work in Flash as I do when I write a really good post, or complete a particularly nice illustration. I guess the creative buzz is the same no matter what gives rise to it.

Anyway, here's a screen grab of the program so far, with explanation to follow:

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Here's a screen grab of the interface I am proposing for the upcoming "Modern Warrior" style HeroMachine Mini:

(Click to embiggen.)

More explanation after the jump.

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