Star Trek: The Dominion War

The Selection of TNG/DS9 era models is rather limited. We have the Modiphius models, as well as a handful from RavenX Studios. Raven X does the best Cardassians & Jem’Hadar. The scale is a bit off, but since they are stl’s its easy enough to play with the scaling and get close enough not to matter.

Sometimes you want that one-off mini. There are plenty of options for commissioning custom minis… but a saturday night at the local Emergency Room is filled with all sorts of things that folks discovered are technically possible…

for today’s option we’re gonna go with quick, cheap, and easy, hoping to get Close Enough.

Enter: HeroForge.

The key to making a HeroForge mini not look like total garbage is setting the height to 8ft tall. If you play around a little bit with the height slider you will notice that the heads and hands scale at a different rate than the body. 8ft seems to be the best balance in my experience to avoid the mini looking like a bobble head wearing mickey mouse gloves.

Work out the pose and clothing that works best for your mini.

When it comes to the gear, look at the gun from as many angles as possible, with an eye for how easy it’s going to be to remove. I picked a revolver, and for the off hand an axe, I chose the axe because of the cloth wrapping on the handle, as I intend to replace it with a Bat’leth.

Blender.

Next we import that STL into Blender.

First we want to select the forehead area, and subdivide it to give us a lot more geometry to work with.

In sculpt mode, just run some lines along the head with the draw brush, then run the crease brush along the edge of those lines. Dont worry too much about being exact, by the time you print that mini out, you wont notice most of your imperfections.

Then is a matter of  matter of just importing a Bat’leth and a Klingon Disruptor stls into your scene, scaling them.

Chop off the weapons, and replace them with the imported ones. fiddling with placement is the part that always seems to take the most time.

Once thats all done, I just select everything and Join it, then export to .stl

From there, Its just a quick repair (there are going to be lots of open faces, and other errors). I just use Prusa Slicer to repair my models, and I need to scale the figure anyways, so I can do both things just fast and easy in Prusa Slicer. I set the Scale to 90%, and export the model as an STL.

from there I can pop it into Lychee or Chitubox or whatever, do my supports, and off to the resin printer.

From start to finish, it takes me about 30 mins. (unless Heroforge is super busy and it takes them hours to get the file ready for download.)