Design Your Own Miniatures With Heroforge!

If you've ever wanted to design your own custom miniatures, you could be in luck. The Heroforge custom miniatures site is now live. It's a little limited at present, but you can head on over and play about. You'll need to register to save your design though.

Heroforge was a highly successful Kickstarter campaign back in February. You design your miniature, and it is shipped to you. The system allows you to work your way through a number of options, much like creating an avatar in a video game. You choose a body, head, hair, face, clothing, and items.

Here's my attempt - a horned female elf in chainmail, leaping into the sky, with fireballs in her hands. Try it out here!

 

[Mr0wlington]

That's some Games Workshop style prices there. Given, you get to design them yourself, it's still pricey for a miniature in a material that may or may not work for you.

I like the system though. I'll give it a few months and see what transpires.

 

[Morrus]

I'm having fun with this. I just created my current elven musketeer character in the Kingmaker campaign we're playing - using her musket AND her spare!

 

[pickin_grinnin]

Way, way too expensive for my taste (and too limited in general). I can pump one of these out on my 3D printer and then smooth the striations down chemically for a fraction of that price, and have as many options as I want. Even if I didn't have that capability, there is no way I would pay that much for a single miniature.

 

[Zaran]

I don't think the price is too bad. I tried to buy one but it won't take my payment info.

 

[Lwaxy]

Doesn't work in Mozilla at all, so tried it with Opera. I think the material needs work, but I like the site to design avatars for my chars now

 

[ExploderWizard]

Oh that's great. Now I'm going to be spending hours building minis!! There is a decent amount of stuff to start with but some staple items are missing such as chain leggings. There are boots that are labeled to go with chain pants but no actual chain pants. I can't wait till they build up the inventory of items.

 

[Fuseboy]

I'd love if it the proportions were slightly more human (short legs, huge hands and feet). I know that's common for miniatures, but printed out as a 3" figurine it makes everyone look like hobbits. I'd love more pose variety - contraposto is pretty good, but some of the others look a bit artificial.

I'd also love a bit of poseability, especially in terms of weapon/item direction and head angle. That would add a lot of interesting variety.

I wonder if you could adjust poses with sliders, which just deformed the skeleton between two poses. Like, start with contraposto, but add 15% come at me bro.

 

[ExploderWizard]

There are still a few glitches that are annoying. I was playing around creating a cool gladiator model and I gave him long hair with a braid down the back. When I added a chest harness his hair was tucked UNDER the harness. Also when giving a character long hair and a helmet, the hair suddenly vanishes. It should still be visible beneath the back of the helm. These may very well be software issues that are next to impossible to fix but I hope not.

 

[Fuseboy]

Also when giving a character long hair and a helmet, the hair suddenly vanishes.

I think that's intentional - some hair options are so voluminous (e.g. ponytails) that they're incompatible with helmets. I don't think the models are driven by a physics model - like, it doesn't work out hair/clothing collisions and deform things suitably. I imagine they just have a list of incompatibilities (diadem works with big hair and/or elf ears, but paladin helm doesn't work with either) and turn the hair off. So, not so much a glitch as a design limitation.

 

[GreenTengu]

I think the $25 mark is the one one has to look at when thinking about getting a decent miniature from this.

If you go for the generic options or use it to create a character for which there is a few hundred variations of it on the market, it isn't worth it. On the other hand, if you dig a bit more into what is there?

You can mix the Fantasy, Far Eastern, Modern and Western sets. You can take pieces from different sets and mix them together. This allow you to create a demi-human in samurai or ninja outfits, a fantasy character with a duster and cowboy hat and so forth.

Although the list of races for fantasy are limited, you can easily put Gnome ears on the tallest of characters and use the fanged teeth to make a decent hobgoblin model (of which there are few on the market) and, of course, if a race is basically identical to another race but with different colored skin (Drow, Duegar), this allows you to make them just fine.

So if you spend a bit of time with it and really put together something that there just isn't anything like it on the market (i.e. I can make a hobgoblin sorcerer/thief with a mix of western, monk and ninja outfit parts with a dao sword and a pistol) then suddenly the $25 mark doesn't seem bad at all to produce what is effectively a totally unique creation.