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Fantasy Folk
Site Information
What and Why
A few months ago, I stumbled across a really nifty gadget called HeroMachine. They call it a "Character Portrait Creator," but that's a bit misleading. Instead of portrait-style (head-and-shoulders type) pictures, it lets you create full-length pictures of fantasy and sci-fi characters. You do it by picking various elements of the picture (eyes, hair, left glove, right foot, and so on) from graphic menus, then selecting colors for the element. It's clever and well done, and you can put together some fascinating folks with it.
There are three versions of HeroMachine available. The first is HeroMachine 2.0, a reasonably priced software package you can order online at the HeroMachine site. The second is HeroMachine 2.0u, a free "demo" version of HeroMachine 2.0 which can be used online at the UnderGroundOnline (UGO) site. The third version is HeroMachine 1.1, an obsolete but still kind of slick version you can download for free at the HeroMachine site.
I started playing with HeroMachine 2.0u and was instantly hooked. This version is fully functional, but limits you in the items you can include to those in the Standard category. Take the Headgear items. You can choose from among the 19 items in Standard. In the full-up 2.0, there are additional categories: Aliens, Fantasy, ModernCommon, Animal and Glasses. There's plenty to work with in 2.0u, though, and it's tons of fun. Version 1.1 is much more limited, but it's still well worth the download. There are some items in there that aren't in 2.0u, and some different poses for the characters.
As I played with HeroMachine, I decided to try something. I've used PhotoPaint a lot, and figured I'd try taking images produced with HeroMachine and tinkering with them a bit. I liked some of the results, and decided to share them on the Web. The HeroMachine site presents a large gallery of images created with HeroMachine 2.0 — some of them really excellent — but this site provides something different. It shows what can be done by a no-talent bum using HeroMachine output as a starting point for work in a graphics program.
Making the Pictures
For those of you really interested in this stuff or thinking about trying it yourself, here's how the character pictures were created. All of the elements in the character pictures, with one exception, were taken or adapted from HeroMachine. (The exception is the device on the Field Force Alexa standard, which was put together from a couple of pieces of heraldic clip art.) In the original sets of pictures, just about everything came from HeroMachine 2.0u. On the Headquarters page, you'll find a few elements taken from HeroMachine 1.1. In the Reinforcements section I'm adding pictures originated in HeroMachine 2.0.
In some cases, all the editing that was done was resizing the background and adding a border. In other cases, there was some bleedthrough (depending on the color combinations used) and this was edited out. Occasionally, I did some tweaking of colors in elements that just didn't quite suit me, mostly certain types of eyes, mouths and hair. The most ambitious type of editing I did was to save out two, three or more pictures of a character, each containing different elements, and cut and paste them into a finished image. This usually required some additional pixel-editing to get things to fit together smoothly.
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To give you a better idea of what went into preparing the images, I figured I'd show you "before-and-afters" of one of them. At the left is the finished image of Petrina Whitesky, one of the Great Forest elves. Below you'll see the three original images used in putting it together. They're shown just as I grabbed them out of HeroMachine 2.0u (the UGO version). The top half of Petrina was copied from the second picture and placed on the first. Then miscellaneous scars were lifted from the third picture and plopped on the image. There wasn't a lot of pixel-editing done. The staff was turned into a cane, wings were added to the specatacles, the stray lock of hair was eliminated, and that was about it. |
Incidental Graphics, Etc.
The buttons and bars used on the site are just things I cobbled together in PhotoPaint. For the national coats-of-arms, I put together PD graphics from a heraldic clip art site (Heraldry Clipart). The maps of Weiland were based on an outline map of Jamaica which I got from some now-forgotten Web site.
You might also be curious about the names of these folks. For many of them, I got all or part of the name from lists generated at a site called Seventh Sanctum. This place has dozens of random generators in fantasy and sci-fi themes: names, places, character descriptions, and on and on. A great resource for the imagination-deprived and lots of fun to browse. The first names of the Great Forest elves are tweaked versions of Italian names I got from one of those baby names sites. Why Italian? I dunno.
Copyright and Usage
All of the character images on this site were created with HeroMachine and are copyright © 2004 by AFD Studios, Inc. Here's the pertinent text from the HeroMachine site:
| The individual images used in the HeroMachine, and any composite assemblage using those specific images, are copyrighted by AFD Studios, Inc. The image you create with the HeroMachine is also copyrighted by AFD Studios, Inc., though permission is automatically granted to use said image without compensation on any non-commercial site. AFD Studios, Inc. does NOT claim copyright on your character CONCEPT. |
If you have any questions about use of these images, I'd suggest you contact AFD Studios.
The site's incidental images — bars, buttons, crests, titles, etc. — are my own work, sometimes using modified public domain clip art. They are copyright © 2005 by Joseph A. Grau, Sr. You are hereby granted permission to use them for any purpose you wish, provided that you do not claim them as your own original work. (People who do that sort of thing really annoy me.) The same goes for text and HTML code.
Site History and Updates
The site "officially opened for business" on 24 April 2005. Will it be updated? I hope so. I've been playing with HeroMachine 2.0 and should be adding characters made with it soon. Stay tuned for the latest developments.
28 April 2005: Added character descriptions for the Bisciaterre contingent and the dwarves from Kharak.
8 May 2005: Added a links page and character descriptions for the folks from Sorminia.
21 May 2005: Added character descriptions for the Great Forest elves.
23 May 2005: Added character descriptions for the Arkenland contingent. This completes the character descriptions — finally!.
14 June 2005: Added the Reinforcements section and the first small sets done with HeroMachine 2.0, the for-purchase version.
Questions? Comments?
If you have questions or comments about this site, please drop me some e-mail... Joseph A. Grau, Sr.
...or post something in the Fantasy Folk Forum:
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