Category Archives: Previews

"Hey, nice guns!" she said admiringly.
"Thanks!" I replied, flexing my biceps.
"No, idiot, the guns you spent all day drawing."

So since she didn't really want to look at my guns, I now inflict them on you. Flex flex.

I've been working on the HM Modren Warrior Mini all day, and have the first five hand-held items ready to roll. Here's a sneak preview:

I'm running into some difficulties with masking -- the shoulder stock on the bottom left gun, for instance, looks weird when masked by the hand. Not sure how to fix that yet, or if I can given the way it's all built. But it's a neat looking gun, you have to give me that!

Also, if you look closely you can see I stole the top three items from Caption Contest prizes. Can you tell which?

I have heard the lamentations of the women (and the commenters) and have revised the one "Top" item I had for the HM Warrior Mini:

Is this one better?

I only have one of each item type drawn, but using most of them gave me the following image from the early HeroMachine Warrior Mini:

Not super exciting yet, but a promising start. If you have any items you'd like to see included, now's the time -- guns, helmets, combat jackets, you name it. Post a link to an image in the comments and I'll go have a look.

I have to say, at this stage of the FaceMaker development, the thing that most surprised me was what a big change the ability to change the line color.

In the Warrior Mini, the biggest two surprises are how much being able to move and scale items is, along with the utility of masking. Pretty neat, I can't wait to get it to a usable point so you all can tinker with it.

I had planned to start drawing items for the Warrior Mini first thing this morning, but I got caught up in building the "masking" part of the applet.

And I'm glad I did, because it rocks.

Here's a screen grab of a very simple masking effect. I added two lightning bolt insignias, colored the same and rotated to face each other at an angle. I masked one with the Body to get a Lightning Lad effect. I had to duplicate the Body to serve as a mask for the second lightning bolt insignia, but it came out really neat:

This feature is a little bit complicated, but I think it's going to be totally awesome. You can make all new uniform effects by, for example, choosing an insignia shape like a chevron or circle or square, and masking it with the body shape. That gives you a form-fitting uniform element like (for instance) a big half-circle colored shape on the top half of the figure.

Hopefully by the end of the week I'll have enough items, and the code in good enough shape, for you all to play with. I am very excited by the way this is turning out! This is another one of the key HM3 features that I've been sweating, and now that I know how to do it, it should be (relatively speaking) a piece of cake to implement for that version.

So I have all these new color swatches to fill in the Warrior Mini, but I don't know what to fill them with. If you have any suggestions, whether it be single colors you'd like or a web site with a palette you'd want to see replicated, please let me know. The current set of colors is below the fold if you're into hexadecimals.

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Which do you like better, the first proposed new HM-mini body template, or this one:

This one has more "attitude", I think. The first is workable, but it looks more like an avatar screen in a game or something, I suspect this one might make for better actual character images. The angle's from just below waist-level, which might be different enough to cause some problems.

I don't know, what do you all think?

UPDATE: With thanks to commenter TheNate and John, here's an updated version with the right foot pointed in a more solid direction, and the right hand no longer stapled to the buttocks.