Turtlefolk, that's a wrap! Next up: Medieval & Legendary
9 months ago – Thu, Aug 10, 2023 at 02:52:54 PM

Turtlefolk Now Available

It's always a bittersweet moment finishing the last page of a great story. Turtlefolk, the last remaining stretch goal of this Kickstarter, have been added to TitanCraft. Per user feedback, the Turtlefolk have been designed with extra thick and stylized arms and legs. The bulky appendages are compatible with short sleeves and short pants, but are not compatible with long sleeves or long pants. If you'd like to make a less bulky turtlefolk, we recommend using either the human body / dragonborn body with dragonborn arms+hands and turtlefolk head.

What an incredible journey it's been! In the past 3 years we have undergone a complete platform overhaul, released the first ever boss monster customizer, brought over all of our existing DesktopHero assets to the party, added even more powerful tools and features such as attaching extra parts anywhere, copy/pasting poses, the community library, the token maker and more... 

A huge thank you to the artists that helped us with this project, especially Mia. She had to juggle her existing patreon work + TitanCraft's for a few months, which was no easy task. She's now happily focusing more on her own work again, but she was also a huge contributor to our next expansions.

A huge thank you to you, the backers. We are a small company, and without your support TitanCraft wouldn't be possible. We can't wait to make TitanCraft even better, and hope you continue to join us on our journey. 

TitanCraft: Medieval & Legendary Expansions

On August 15, our next project launches on Kickstarter! TitanCraft: Medieval & Legendary Expansions is a project focused on some of our most requested assets and monsters, including more armor options, more weapon options, ogres, golems and hippogriffs. You can sign up to get notified here. See you there!

Happy crafting.

Jared & Andrew

Token Maker Now Live, New Environments, Next Project Signup
10 months ago – Wed, Jul 12, 2023 at 03:24:16 PM

Hey everyone! 

It's been a few weeks since our last update, and we're very excited to share with you what we have been working on. The token maker, our last software stretch goal, has been completed and is now available to all TitanCraft users for free. Let's dive in!

Token Maker

When we started designing the token maker, we wanted to make sure that it fit hand-in-hand with our existing tools and features.  This allows you to go back and forth making adjustments to your character and token simultaneously. It also allowed us to provide you a way to choose between dozens of different environments that you can use for creating your tokens or for simply making a suitable ambience for your character creation experience (more on that later).  You'll find a new menu option for the token maker next to our existing tabs such Body, Items, Pose etc.

--- Environment Tab ---

Use this tab to select and control the background you want to use. When cycling through different environment options, the token frame is disabled to make it easier to see the new background.

 
  The controls at the top of the Environment tab allow you to toggle the base circle on/off, toggle the platform on/off, adjust the platform size, rotate the background (this really helps you get the perfect shot), and adjust the background blur.

 
--- Frame Tab ---

There are 4 frame options to choose from: Full Screen, Circle, Square and Hex. The Presets dropdown menu allows you to choose from preset token sizes, 100x100, 200x200, 400x400 and Maximum (i.e. your screen size). Most VTTs these days recommend a token size of 400x400, but it's a good idea to check what the specific requirements of whichever platform you're using.

--- Export ---

To export your token, simply click on the Export button and select the file type you want -- JPG, PNG or WebP.  And that's it! No payment or checkout required. Your new token will be downloaded to your device.

If you find out that you would like to make some adjustments to your character before generating the token, simply modify your character using our existing tools, and then click on the Token menu option again.

New Environments and Materials

By now you have most likely realized that things look different. The token maker gave us a perfect time to work on improving and refreshing the way our models, thumbnails and environments look. Here is a quick summary of everything that has changed.

-- New Gray Material -- our default material is now more of a neutral gray. We made this switch because a) the color looks and works much better with the different environment backgrounds and b) the material plays much nicer with shadows.

-- New Lighting -- our old Lighting Effects have been replaced with 3 new graphics settings: Best, Medium and Basic. Our new lighting provides more accurate shadows without sacrificing performance (we recommend using the Basic setting on mobile phones and iPads).

-- New Environments -- there are dozens of new environments available to use as token backgrounds or simply to make your character creation experience more enjoyable. The environments even interact with your character where some of the environment's color is shared on your character. For example, a scene filled with fire or lava will make your character appear slightly red/orange.

Next Steps & New Project Signup! 🎊🥳

Believe it or not, the only stretch goal left from this Kickstarter is Turtlefolk, and we have already got started on that. This Kickstarter's journey is coming to an end, and we hope you love using TitanCraft as much as we do. We've done our best to work hard, stay focused and commit to timely delivery of stretch goal features, but that's not all we have been working on. :) 

We're happy to announce TitanCraft will soon be launching an expansion project featuring two new asset packs and three new monster packs, all of which include some of our most requested items.

 ➡️ sign up to get notified on launch ⬅️

We've said it before, and we'll say it again. Thank you. TitanCraft wouldn't be possible without your support. Here's to the next adventure! 🍻 

Jared & Andrew

Combat Chairs, Pose Sliders, Numeric Input
11 months ago – Tue, May 23, 2023 at 10:53:31 AM

Hi everyone! We've just released quite a hefty update containing several features that you unlocked as stretch goals during the campaign. 🎉🎊

The Pose Sliders stretch goal is definitely the biggest part of today's update, so please read carefully! Our advanced pose tools have undergone a huge overhaul to a) accommodate our new pose sliders and numeric input and b) make our advance pose tools more accessible to new users. Some of you might not have even known these tools existed, so we're going to cover everything. Let's go!

Advanced Pose How-To

When you click the Pose tab, the advanced posing tools activate and you see the following:

Let's look at these pieces one by one.

Pose Toolbar

The pose toolbar sits above your character in the editor.

•  A. Change Mode: This changes the bone controls between Move, Rotate, and Scale (i.e. make a bone bigger or smaller).
•  B. Axis Options: Change whether movement is relative to the bone's current orientation (Local Axis), absolute left/right/up/down/forward/back (World Axis), or up/down/left/right on the screen (Screen Axis).
•  C. Bone Limits ON/OFF: Some bones have limits set on their rotation, position and scale. This is to make posing easier for new users, so you don't accidentally end up with parts inside the body or way off in the distance. You can turn limits off to get full freedom of movement.
•  D. Full Part ON/OFF: With Full Part mode ON, you can select whole parts and move them as if they had a single bone. This is useful for moving characters around, placing new parts you've added to the scene, and scaling pieces together rather than bone-by-bone.

•  E: Reset: Restores the selected bone to its original position, rotation and scale. If Full Part mode is active, resets the whole part to its default pose.

Pose Sliders Menu

This menu lives at the top of the pose tab.

•  A. Bone Navigation: These buttons let you change which bone is selected on the skeleton. Select Previous goes down the skeleton tree (toward the base), Select Nextgoes up the tree (toward head/fingers), and Switch Branch lets you change which branch of the tree you are on (e.g. switch from left shoulder to right shoulder).
•  B. Numeric Input: Lets you enter in values for the bone's position, rotation and scale. Useful if you want to give multiple parts consistent transforms, or if you are building something geometric.
•  C. Pose Tools: Same as on the Pose Toolbar, described above.
•  D. Pose Sliders: Use these sliders to move, rotate or scale the selected bone along the axis matching the slider color. If limits are turned off, or if the bone has no limits set, the slider thumb will snap back to the center after you move it so you can move it again. (Note: Sliders are not affected by Axis Options. They always move the bone along its local axis.)

Copy/Paste Poses

In pose mode, you can right click a part to copy the pose (starting at that part), then paste it onto another part that shares the same skeleton type. 

 This also works across characters, as long as they have the same skeleton type. (Different proportions are OK.)

This means if you find a character pose you like the Community Library, you can load it, copy the pose, and paste it onto one of your own characters.

Undo/Redo

Undo/Redo is currently only for poses, not for adding/removing meshes or other character changes. It's been moved to its new location (bottom right on desktop, top right on mobile) in anticipation of the day when we can implement a more useful universal undo/redo.

Combat Chairs

Today's update introduces 6 new combat chairs, including:

• Royal Wheelchair (part of a new asset pack this releasing this summer!)
• Trackchair (Modern Pack)
• All-Terrain Chair (Modern Pack)
• Hoverchair (Sci-Fi Pack)
• Walkerchair (Sci-Fi Pack)
• Sci-Fi Wheelchair (Sci-Fi Pack)

Each chair has been set up to be customizable, with features like swappable footrests, controls, wheels and handles. We can potentially add more options in the future depending on how much of a demand you have for these. Let us know what you think!

Try it!

You can access the new stuff now at titancraft.com.

We hope you enjoy these additions! It's been a lot of work putting them in but we're very pleased with how they've turned out.

Big thanks to our Discord members for providing early feedback and helping us revise the new features. If you want to talk D&D with some cool, friendly people, and be involved in our decision making as we develop TitanCraft, we'd love for you to join our Discord.

Thanks for reading!

Andrew & Jared

Community Library Now Available 🎉, Pose Sliders Underway
about 1 year ago – Thu, Apr 06, 2023 at 11:31:59 AM

Happy Spring everyone! We wanted to give you an update on where things are at with our stretch goals. Let's dive in.

Community Library (aka User Creations Gallery) Now Available!

We're happy to announce that one of our major stretch goal features, the Community Library (formerly referred to as the User Creations Gallery), is now available on titancraft.com! With this feature, you can share your favorite characters and creations for other TitanCraft users to browse and use in their own files.  Here's a quick overview of how you can start using the Community Library.

How to Access the Community Library

To open the Community Library, you can either click on the Community Library tab in the new character menu or click on the plus button on the left side of the character creator. You will then be able to browse through all sorts of cool shared creations. Filters and a search bar have also been provided to help you narrow down something in particular you might be looking for. Note: filters are assigned by the creator when they share a character.

How to Share One of Your Characters to the Community Library

You can share a character directly from the character creator by opening the menu in the lower right, and then clicking on 'Publish to Community Library'.

The first time you try to share a character, you will be prompted to agree to our community guidelines and create a community profile name. Please carefully read the guidelines and screen name requirements.

Once you have agreed to the guidelines and created your screen name, you'll then be able to add all the details and tags for your shared character!

Note: it will take a few minutes for your shared creation to appear in the Community Library.

You can also share a character directly from the new Shared Creations section of your account page, which we will cover below.

How to Manage Shared Characters

In the user dropdown menu, there is a new link for 'My Shared Creations'. This page allows you to add, remove or modify your existing shared characters. Click on the green 'Share a Character' button to share a new character to the library, or click on the gear icon on previously shared characters to edit or remove them from the library.

Known iOS Bugs 🍎🐛

With our latest update, we have again run into some iOS exclusive bugs primarily affecting some iPads and iPhones. If you are using one of these devices and encounter a crash or refresh while using the site, please let us know either in our discord or sending us an email at [email protected]. Be sure to include what you were doing prior to and when the crash occurred.

Pose Sliders In Progress

As far as other stretch goal features are concerned, we're making good progress on the new pose tools including pose sliders and numeric input. As part of this update, we plan on making some adjustments to the Pose tab to help make things less confusing and less cluttered. We're not sure when things will be ready enough for testing, so stay tuned!

That's all for now. If you have any questions or comments let us know! We might be a little slower to respond -- we all are a little under the weather.

Jared & the TitanCraft team

Happy Launch Day! ~ How to Redeem Your Reward ~ TitanCraft's Roadmap ~ Giveaways!
about 1 year ago – Thu, Mar 02, 2023 at 11:06:23 AM

Happy launch day everyone! 

With today's update, we are officially releasing TitanCraft Heroes. First and foremost, let's go over how to redeem your Kickstarter reward if you haven't done so already.

How to Redeem Your Kickstarter Reward

- Check your email for your reward code. The email subject will be "Claim your TitanCraft Heroes Rewards!". Over the next couple days we will send out another batch of emails to those who haven't activated their reward yet.

- Create your TitanCraft account at titancraft.com.

- After creating your account and verifying your email address, select My Coupons under your TitanCraft user profile.

- Click Add Coupon and enter the 16 digit code that was emailed to you.

- Digital Reward backers: your Kickstarter rewards will automatically be unlocked to your account upon code activation.

- Physical Reward backers: after activating your reward code, you will have coupons that you can apply to your cart after creating your miniatures.

You can find a copy of these instructions on our Frequently Asked Questions page.

--- Note for those who never filled out your BackerKit Survey ---

You will receive your email a few days later after we have manually confirmed your orders in BackerKit. We will also send survey reminders in case you want to help speed up the process.

--- Note for those who use Apple IDs for Kickstarter ---

You will need to send us a message with your preferred email address that we can send your reward code to. Please include your Apple ID and backer number and send your message to [email protected].

Lizardfolk, Red Panda, Half Orc, Gnome, Werewolf, Firbolg, Zombies now available

In today's update we are releasing *all the remaining species presets (except for turtlefolk). That gives TitanCraft a total of 26 different hero presets to choose from.

What about my turtles? 🐢🥹

A couple months ago we ran a poll in our discord asking users if they would like our turtlefolk to have some of the distinct tortle features such as extra bulky arms and legs. It was clear that a lot of our users want these features, so that's what we're going to do! Unfortunately this will require some additional programming and sculpting, which requires more time. Turtlefolk are coming, just a little slower than the rest. 🐢💨

New Lizard Mount

The DesktopHero lizard mount has been completely overhauled thanks to BlueWyvern, and is now available to use on TitanCraft. If you like how the lizard mount turned out, let us know in the comments below. ⬇️

Attention Merchants: 1st year starts now

We hope that you were able to activate your merchant rights and benefit from the free bonus time while we were in beta. If you have already activated your rights, they will expire 1 year from today. If you haven't redeemed your reward code yet, your license will expire 1 year after you redeem your reward code.

Launch Sale

To help celebrate, we are running a launch sale with 10-20% off Asset Packs, cheaper monsters prices, and 10% off our new Asset Pack Bundles! 🎁 Sales end March 12, 11:59PM MST.

 Revised Monster Pack Pricing (Digital)

When we first launched TitanCraft, it was home only to customizable monsters. Things have changed now with the addition of Heroes, and we have adjusted our monster prices to play nicer with kitbashing between humanoid and monster models or using monster models as mounts. TLDR: monster parts, monster packs and one-time STL downloads are cheaper now. For those who would like to see the exact changes, we are including a summary at the end of this update.

Launch Celebration Giveaways

Last but not least, we will be hosting a giveaway on our social media pages to celebrate TitanCraft Heroes Launch! Keep your eye out on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram @titancraftminis for all the details. Prizes include:

Grand Prize: All-Inclusive Bundle or $100 TC Gift Card (1 winner)

1st Prize: Epic Heroes Bundle or Epic Monsters Bundle or $50 TC Gift Card (3 winners)

2nd Prize: Asset Pack Your Choice or $20 TC Gift Card (5 winners)

3rd Prize: One-Time STL Download (10 winners)

TitanCraft's 2023 Roadmap

For the next few weeks we primarily be working on finishing off the remaining stretch goal assets and features including:

- Turtlefolk, slow and steady wins the race. 🐢

- Combat wheelchairs

- Software features including User Creation Gallery, Copy/Paste Custom Poses, Pose Sliders + Numerical Input, Digital Token Makers

Later this year we have plans to release new asset packs, many of which are already underway! The new packs will help us grow our asset library and fund more improvements to the TitanCraft platform. They will most likely release as campaigns, so make sure you are on our mailing list or following one of our socials for updates!

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Thanks for being a part of this journey with us. We couldn't have done it without you, and can't wait to keep improving everything TitanCraft has to offer. 

Go on now! Start creating hordes of miniatures! If you have any questions on how to use some of our features, we recommend joining our discord.

- the TitanCraft team