LGM 2019 – The Free Character Creator
Channel: Libre Graphics Meeting
Date: 17/07/2019

Frédéric Guimont
The Free Character Creator

The Character Creator is a free (AGPL) web application (HTML5 + CSS3 + JS + SVG) which enables artists to quickly generate original characters from a series of choices and options. Artists can create, download and modify the images in Inkscape for use in games, comics, websites or any 2D medium.

This talk will show you how I built the Character Creator to streamline my workflow for making comics, how you can clone the project, and adapt it to suit your artistic style. You’ll learn how to create assets with vector graphics in Inkscape, to optimize them for the web, manage them with Javascript, download them to further edit in Inkscape yet again and, finally, to publish them online freely for all to see.

Frédéric Guimont -I am a comic book artist in my free time and a web developer the rest of the time. I have created a comic book adaptation of Orwell “1984” in 2004 and since then, I have been experimenting with new ways to create comics for the web. I have been working with Free Software since 2004. I have worked as a frontend developper for Savoir-Faire Linux. I have given talks at various conferences (HOPE in NY in 2005, WAQ in Québec in 2017 and GrafikLabor in Rennes in 2016). I am looking to contribute to the Free Software community with code, visual ressources and by developping techniques that enable creators to add visuals to their projects without legal restrictions. I have built the Character Creator from scratch for myself and others to use, and have built a small JS framework to view comics online with a fast and simple navigation.

https://charactercreator.org/

This presentation was recorded on Sunday, 2nd June 2019 as part of Libre Graphics Meeting 2019, at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar in Saarbruecken, Germany. To learn more, see https://libregraphicsmeeting.org/2019/.