Hero Forge, an online tool that lets you design and print custom miniatures for Dungeons and Dragons miniatures and other tabletop games, has a distinctive house style: it’s cheerful, heroic, and a little bit World of Warcraft. That’s only if you’re using the basic platform, however: the recently added kitbashing tools open up a whole world of possibilities for grimdark and gruesome original creations.
The core of Hero Forge software works like a videogame character creator. You have a digital dolly that you can outfit and pose with the gear, weapons, and spells to represent a variety of DnD classes and a huge range of DnD races.
You can then pay to download an STL file of your DnD figure to print at home or have Hero Forge print it and ship it to you. Wargamer has a separate guide about how to use Hero Forge if you’d like to learn the basics.
The kitbash tools let you break almost all of the core rules of the software, smashing together digital components to create something completely new. The tools are part of the paid Pro subscriber package – I was given free review access by the Hero Forge team, plus free credits so I could download my figures and print them at home.
I wanted to give the kitbash tools a real stress test. The default aesthetic for Hero Forge is cute, upbeat, and chunky – would the kitbash tools enable me to make something gnarly, horrific, and grimdark?
My home gaming group is gearing up to play Trench Crusade, a recently crowdfunded skirmish wargame that sees religious fanatics battling the forces of hell on the frontlines of an unending, World-War-One-style trench war. The game’s illustrations, by concept artist Mike Franchina, are gruesome. What better test for Hero Forge’s kitbash tools than trying to match the vibe?
I planned to create interpretations of five Heretic Legion units: a massive and gluttonous Sin Eater, a satanic special-forces Death Commando, a massive line-breaking War Wolf, a blasphemous Heretic Priest, and the gnarliest of all, a Chorister – a heretic so committed to the cause he committed ritual suicide and now carries his own, decapitated head.
Hero Forge’s kitbash tools give you full control over the animation skeleton inside your model, letting you shrink, expand, twist, and simply relocate each of its bones, right down to individual fingers. I manipulated just about every joint on the Warwolf to position it into a headlong run. Shrinking heads, hands, and feet to create more naturalistic proportions is a simple and effective way to make models much less cartoony.
As well as all the basic outfitting you do with your model, you can add up to twenty kitbash pieces. These can be literally any component (other than another body) from the Hero Forge library, which you can scale, rotate, and in some cases bend and flex, before affixing to your base model.
As with physical kitbashing, you need to get creative with the components available – the parts library is big, but it’s not going to cover everything you want to create. The Chorister has a hamburger patty for a neck stump, and the profane fountain of blood spouting from the wound is actually a magical crutch.
The head he’s holding is actually a second character. I deleted its legs and shrunk down the lower body until it was minuscule, then hid it inside a skeletal horse’s tail I used to make a dangling spinal column.
How far your part budget stretches depends on how much you want to create totally unique shapes. The Chorister’s anti-crucifixes use up three components each, thanks to their hooks and clasps. Over half the component budget on the Death Commando is spent on its layered tassets and culet.
I have a decent amount of experience doing physical kitbashes and even a little scratch sculpting, and I have tried (and failed) to learn digital sculpting a few times. I found the tool easy to use, but it needs patience – the kitbashes took several hours each. I was working from Mike Franchina’s Trench Crusade art so I had references for posing, key features, and general vibes, which definitely saved time.
The tools available to you are quite limited compared to real 3D design software, but that’s almost entirely a good thing for an amateur. With so few tools available I could easily find them all, compared to the baffling interface of most design software.
I did hit a couple of snags. When anchoring kitbash pieces onto the model’s body or another kitbash piece (so that they move when you move the piece they’re anchored to), you simply drag the two parts together. Changing where a part is anchored always involves moving it, spoiling any careful positioning you’ve already done.
And several times I wanted to specify the percentage by which I was scaling an object, so I could scale it uniformly in each dimension, but the only scaling tool was click and drag handles.
Of the five miniatures I set out to create, I’m satisfied with four of them. The Sin Eater was my first model, and while I’m proud of some elements – the helmet is made from an inverted cauldron, a mimic, and three tiny astronaut helmets for eyes – the torso just isn’t chunky enough for my satisfaction.
Once you commit to downloading an STL or sending it to Hero Forge to print for you, there’s no going back. Hero Forge has a variety of tools that will detect weaknesses in your model that might make it impossible to print, and can auto-thicken elements of the build it thinks are weak, but ultimately, you’re taking it on faith that your design is going to work.
I’ve downloaded four of the models as STLs so far – I’ve not bothered with the Sin Eater. Of those, the Heretic Priest remains as yet-unprinted due to a house move putting my printer into storage. The Chorister STL had a very strange error: a single, infinitely thin line that projected from the top of his blood-fountain. This didn’t print, but the slicer software did create supports for it.
There isn’t an objective measurement tool in Hero Forge, other than a D20 for scale, so I wasn’t sure exactly how big the models would come out. I resized the minis in the slicer software before printing, using a Bestiarum Miniatures 3D model that I planned to print for the basic foot troops in the warband as a scale reference.
I used a Mars 5 Ultra resin printer with Phrozen RPG resin to print out the minis – goodies that I also received as product samples from their respective manufacturers. I know what the machine and the goo are capable of, so I ignored the warnings that Hero Forge gave me about dangerously thin models.
I thought that the models all printed fine, until I took the photographs, and noticed a crack in the chest of the Chorister. Despite the Chorister being the one with the weird STL error, I don’t think that was the problem. He was part of a batch of prints that had a large number of failures because I (a fool) had not cleaned the resin tank, and floating shards of cured resin created problems throughout the batch.
My biggest surprise using Hero Forge’s kitbashing tools was how well it scratched my itch for physical kitbashing. I love to convert models, but that’s been impossible recently with the house move. Some tasks that would be trivial on a physical build, like filling a gap with putty, are surprisingly hard with digital minis – but the ‘undo’ button is simply magical for correcting mistakes, and it is much less messy!
Although I haven’t made one-to-one recreations of Franchina’s artwork, I’m very satisfied with how well I was able to capture the distinctive grimdark aesthetic. In the interests of not sounding completely self-satisfied, I’ll point to the excellent Trench Crusade models that other Hero Forge community members have created as more evidence of what the kit-bashing tool can achieve.
There are a variety of subscription options for Hero Forge Pro, depending on whether you want to pay a la carte for your STLs or get download credits bundled with your subscription, and whether you want a single-month, three-month, or 12-month sub. A single month with five STL credits bundled in costs $19.99.
If you enjoy kit-bashing and have a 3D printer (or a friend with one who’s happy to make minis at cost), $4 per digital mini feels like a very fair rate. If physical kitbashing isn’t open to you at the moment – due to lack of space, your hobby stuff being in storage following a house move or a new baby or puppy at home, or because injury or illness limits your use of your hands – then I definitely recommend Hero Forge’s digital equivalent.
If you’re a TTRPG regular with your finger on the pulse of the DnD release schedule, and this has tickled your fancy for creating some models, make sure you check out our guide on how to paint miniatures. Or, for something more rulesy, here’s all you need to know about DnD classes these days.
Source: Wargamer
