Coat of Arms Visual Designer Updated Again

The Coat of Arms Visual Designer has gained many new features lately. If you are not familiar with the designer, it allows anyone to quickly create a free coat of arms in minutes. You may want a coat of arms for a knight or noble character, an important NPC, a kingdom, state or organization, or outside of gaming you may want to recreate an ancestor’s coat of arms or design your own.

The most time consuming new feature to implement was the ability to add a division to a division.  While this idea isn’t common among coats of arms, it isn’t very rare either. So now for example a shield can be divided per quarter and then any of those quarters can be divided per pale, etc. But the division change required changing many other things.

To keep this feature as easy to understand and manipulate as possible, a new approach to selecting objects on the shield was needed.  The simple list of objects (that was below the shield on the screen) was no longer good enough.  So now a user sees green hot spots on the shield and there is no list of objects.  At first, there is just one central green hot spot.  But each time a new division is added, more hot spots appear to allow a user to manipulate objects that may belong to that part of the division.  Clicking on any of these hot spots will open a menu with choices to add objects to that area, reorder objects in that area (if there are more than two) and select any of the objects currently in that area so an object may be edited.

Already a couple of new divisions are available (per chevron and per saltire) in addition to the old divisions (per bend, per bend sinister, per pale, per fess, and per quater) and more divisions will be added shortly.

Another new distinction for divisions is the notion of fitting the objects that belong to a part of a division to that division part.  This is for historical and practical reasons: Early on when a shield was divided per pale (a vertical line) and the eastern side was given a chevron ordinary, half of the ordinary was covered by the western side so there was no way to know if the eastern side had a chevron or a bend ordinary (they are nearly identical on the eastern half) by looking at it.  This ambiguity could occur with other divisions and ordinaries as well. Also, some believe the “double headed eagle” charge was caused by having a per bend division with an eagle on each side facing different directions.  So eventually, divisions were “abated” properly meaning that the charges were squeezed to fully fit their parent division part.  In the visual designer, a user can choose to resize the charges to fit by checking or unchecking a checkbox on the division’s edit area.

In addition to continuing to add new divisions and creatures and symbols, the software will soon get better support for ordinaries (the user will be able to specify a number of the specified ordinary when appropriate) and later borders and partition lines will be added (raguly, engrailed, etc.)