NPO #35: HeroMachine - Phoenix Edition
Article by Sean Wilkinson,
a.k.a. HeroMachiner Timedrop23
I had intended to post this at the end of May, but decided not to for the sake of my own peace of mind (or, as the case is here, my piece of mind). So let's start off with a few reminders of what this post is all about. In April (so many fans of the original Flash-based beta tempered our expectations with the assumption that it would be a cruel prank on us Fourthmonth Fools), the GOAT, the Man, Myth, & Legend, Mr. Jeff Hebert instead chose to embrace the rebirth theme of the month by announcing the return of his character creation magnum opus as a Phoenix Edition that runs natively in your browser of choice. And mad lad that he is, Jeff even spent the month updating HM:PE with new assets and features, all drawn by himself and Hall Of Fame character creator dblade. I gave the new Phoenix Edition a crack on my birthday and ended up designing a basic version of one of my characters for the big milestone project, only to see more concept-friendly assets get added to the program in the following days, so I stopped using it for awhile and put my efforts toward other things (including expending my energy on toxic professional feelings, which is never a good idea) until the update flow began to drop to a trickle.
But I feel like I did enough with HeroMachine: Phoenix Edition to give it a fair first impression review, so here we are at last.
To begin my thoughts, let's talk about what the ideal platform is to use. Being brutally honest, if you only have a smartphone, get something else to run HeroMachine on because the screen is too small to accommodate all of the controls and the image simultaneously, and touch-dragging items is an exercise in tedium. The second best option (read: the first viable option) is a tablet because, duh, bigger screen so you can see and use all of the controls effectively. The touch-dragging of items on the canvas is still not ideal on a tablet, and pinch-resize functionality is not a function. Which means a laptop or desktop is the ideal hardware for using HeroMachine. And a browser with a small backend is probably a smart idea, too. I use Chrome and my laptop and tablet are around a decade old, so initial loading and responsiveness is slower than a molasses snail. But once you get a few item categories loaded, it's as smooth as butter. You can drag and scale whole item groups and images like it's Photoshop, import saved characters as items for easy group shots (I haven't tried this yet, but Jeff says it's a present, tested, and working feature, so I'm mentioning it), select the orientation view of your project (including blowing up the program to fullscreen so the website doesn't get in your way).... Wait. I'm getting ahead of myself.
For those who don't know about HeroMachine, it's like those old doll dress-up Flash and Java games that used to be all over the internet pre-2020, but with the functionality cranked to eleventy, so you're not just placing clothing, hair, and faces on a static pose and changing their color from pre-set options, you can choose your own colors, create your own posed model by scaling, rotating, and moving individual body parts, then do the same with clothing, hair, individual facial features, accessories, and background elements, and even mask patterns and gradients onto those assets for more textured, detailed creations. It's an incredibly powerful creative tool. This is a very "basic" explanation of what you're in for as a new 'Machiner, and if that sounds overwhelming, there are preset item collections you can start with to get yourself familiar with the program through the standard doll dress-up stuff I mentioned earlier. The other option if you haven't made anything yet is to go through the Items tab category by category, see what's available, and start adding stuff to the canvas as you like. Each item can be flipped horizontally or have its layering priority adjusted from there (the cool new feature for Phoenix Edition is the ability to enter a Layer number in a text box in addition to the Up/Down One and Snap to Front/Back buttons). This is a great quality of life feature, as is mirror-adding things like eyes, ears, and hands, so as to avoid extra navigation to a Left/Right category. There was an issue with adding items where they would spawn at Layer 1 (the bottom) so I had to bring them to the front each time to see and edit them properly, but this seems to have been fixed since May. Of importance also are the Duplicate (make another of the currently selected item) button and the Multiple checkbox that lets you select multiple items in a category without overwriting other items you selected in that category. Multiple is your friend!
Next is the Color tab that lets you assign two colors for each item and a lineart color if black is too comic booky for your design sensibilities (it's clearer for some items than others which is which, but it's not a big deal if you guess wrong because you can swap and copy your three colors between each other via drop-down menus), and even type in and save your own custom hex colors, use the color wheel, and adjust the alpha opacity in real time (a big help when you want to do advanced stuff like layered masking, multiple patterns, or shade blending). There's also Painting functionality that lets you copy color schemes between items. Like I said, it's like Photoshop, but both more flexible and more rigid in all the right ways (you can't draw freeform on the canvas...yet). I would like it if there wasn't so much scrolling on this tab, because I would often scroll down for more colors and forget that I had to scroll back up to see the controls. Maybe it's just something I need to get used to, but it bugged me.
Speaking of Photoshop, now we're at the Transform tab. You can choose to use the Transform controls on either the currently clicked item, an item category, or the entire image, and Phoenix Edition has relativity functionality so your image doesn't go spinning to pieces and destroy all your hard work like the Flash version did (thankfully, there's also an Undo button for that above the four main tabs). This can take getting used to from a math and "what do I have clicked right now?" perspective, but as someone who used the Flash version for years, I love it, and I was awed at how visually responsive the controls were here (which is why I got ahead of myself earlier). Those being Cartesian scaling (you can lock proportions or free-form it, scale by dragging a reticle around an xy plane, flip horizontally or vertically, or enter scaling percentages manually, with negative values handling the flip), unit circle rotation (you can also manually enter a degree value), and eight-directional Cartesian movement in one, five, ten, or twenty-unit increments (or you can enter x and y values manually or drag your selection around the canvas). And there are reset buttons in case you mess up or change your mind.
Finally, there is the Patterns tab, which lets you overlay a pattern (duh) on the selected item so you can make a character wearing heart-covered boxers, fishnet stockings, and camouflage high heels if you want. This will undo any masking you've already done on the item, so duping your base item and zeroing the duplicate's color alphas before applying the pattern to it is a solution I use a lot. My only complaint is that the preview icons don't accurately show you what each pattern is, so quite a bit of trial and error is necessary here when that wasn't the case with the Flash version.
Other functionality that I haven't interacted with that much (or at all) are Saving and Loading. To come back to a project later, you can save it as a text file or natively (beware of your browser cache, though), and load it back in the same way. You can also save a finished image as a JPG or PNG in a set but large variety of orientations and resolutions.
To summarize, HeroMachine is a 2-D character creator's dream that runs like Vaseline on the right hardware and has a potentially overwhelming amount of flexibility, but a few minor, subjective flaws that may vanish with familiarity or future updates, and the community is one of the healthiest I've experienced online.
When my milestone project is done with, I will explore the intricacies of the Phoenix Edition further and get back to creating and interacting with the HeroMachine community. Until then, Stay Tuned for a new GFT Retrospective tomorrow, and a special Independence Day Just the Ticket (not that one). Thank you again for getting me to a second month over ten thousand views, and please continue to support me and what I do by Becoming A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have opinions about, help out my ad revenue as you read so I can afford to keep giving you a Piece of my mind and making characters, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.
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Ticketmaster,
HeroMachiner,
Out Of My Mind,
And Out Of June.
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