Debuting a New, Free Superhero Sketch Tool

For a while I’ve had an idea of making a simple superhero sketch tool where you pick one of 5 or 8 heads, torsos and legs, set a few colors and have a completed superhero sketch.  This was to be part of my superhero generator project (that debuted a couple of months ago and uses the icons character generator rules and will be updated with other goodies soon.) However, I think it should stand on its own because Champions, Mutants & Masterminds, and other superhero game players will find it useful as well.

I was working toward that goal (along with amazing artist Keith Curtis) with a fairly time consuming process of pre-coloring the sections with many combinations for each section.  (It could have been worse!)  Then a new approach hit me.

I can convert the individual head, torso and leg graphics to SVGs (scalable vector graphics) then have the program construct them together in the html file because more and more browsers are supporting SVGs natively now.  Next, I can code the colors of my raw SVG files consistently so that the program can search and replace the colors with the user’s choices.  These last couple of steps might be possible using some Javascript on the client side, but my Java/JSP is a little better and Java/JSP is a little more reliable, so I went with Java/JSP instead.

Give it a try: http://www.inkwellideas.com/roleplaying_tools/superhero_sketch/

(Note that the SVG conversion process lost Keith’s shading and made some minor changes to his original images.  We’ll look into correcting that too.)

By the way, I do know of the UGO Hero Machine (which does something similar but with many more choices) but I was looking for something that was a little simpler (fewer options). Also this doesn’t use Flash, so it is interesting to try another approach in a different technology.  In time I do plan to have more options, but not nearly the number of Hero Machine.