Hero Forge

I recently came across a piece of software called Hero Forge.

Hero Forge is a website where you can design your miniatures which you can then either order from them or download and then print on your own 3D printer.

In my case, I thought, “well, this is an interesting tool, let’s see what it can do.” After playing with for a while I learned that while it doesn’t have all the things I would like, it is super close and is a great tool for a number of specific purposes.

One thing I was looking for was something I could use to create an ogre. Depending on the ogre you want, it could be really muscular or it could have a really big potbelly. I wanted both types: one with a potbelly and one that was super muscular and while the software did a good job of creating the really muscular version, it struggled with the big potbelly version. The software has a decent amount of sliders to adjust the proportions of the miniature. You can make them large in the chest and narrow legs or reverse that, but nothing for taking the stomach and making them have a large pot belly.

Another challenge I encountered was when trying to color the minuature. When I attempted to change the color of the ogre’s face, it also colored the hair and I couldn’t find a way of changing the hair color with the specific hairstyle that I chose. Other hairstyles seemed to work with thier auto theme colorizer, but not this one. Overall, though, I’d say the software is good. It could use some refinement and I suppose if I really wanted to, I could download the STL file and throw it into Procreate and colorize the models however I wanted.

One thing I should note is that everything I used was free. You really start to pay for things when you want to print the models. You can have them print them in a quality resin or you can download a 3D model and take care of the printing yourself.

You can also export an image of the characters, either full body shot, headshot or any other kind of angled image you wanted to by just using their screenshot tool. Using this character image you can then use it as a reference as you write.

With the exception of these couple of issues, I would say Hero Forge is a great tool when you’re looking to create characters and miniatures. I look forward to more content and adjustments as the continue to update and the software.

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Photo is a minuature I creted within the software. You can see it online at Hero Forge