Hero Forge Bring Their Full-Colour 3D Prints To Kickstarter
January 15, 2020 by brennon
So, the folks at Hero Forge are now on Kickstarter as they look to fund their new 2.0 program and a range of Full-Colour 3D prints plus the option to get your miniatures professionally painted too. They certainly don't really need more support as they are already 2000% funded!
So, their focus for the campaign is on developing the new platform so that it features all manner of new options for you to tinker around with (some of which are shown in the miniature above) plus also offering up the chance to apply colour in its various shades across the characters you're creating.
After you've then tinkered with designing a character you can then decide upon whether or not you want to get it printed in colour...
...or have it professionally painted by their team so that it arrives in a different state which folks will be more familiar too.
Now, whilst the professionally painted miniatures look nice they are decidedly more expensive and so, at least for what most people are going to be using these Hero Forge characters for, I think that the 3D printed colour miniatures are a pretty good deal. Yes, the colour isn't quite as sharp but they've managed to get shading into the mix and they look a lot better than a WizKids figure (albeit at a much higher price tag).
This isn't going to be for everyone but I think that the final product they have been showing off is pretty nice. It seems to be better for certain colours as (for example) when you look at the elephant warrior above when next to the others, certain elements of the model are more defined.
As well as the options to get pieces 3D printed in colour and the option for professional painting they have also a way for you to turn your 3D render that you've worked on into tokens for use in the likes of Roll20 and such. It is a nice way to get your character designs into roleplaying games played across the world through the use of the internet.
You can learn more about the process of designing your characters and their time frame over on the Kickstarter page, but as it stands it seems like this is going to be a lot of fun for a lot of people. There are many, many folks who are diving into roleplaying games right now and want their beloved characters popping up on the tabletop. I can see this really exploding over the coming months.
What do you make of their offerings?
"There are many, many folks who are diving into roleplaying games right now and want their beloved characters popping up on the tabletop..."
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My issue (and no one seems to be talking about it lol) is the Coloured 3D prints look lower print resolution than the other two options.
And it’s not just about the colour, to me at least they look less detailed in their form. 🙂
And I cant see a description of the technology used to print them anywhere 🙂
Partnership with Shapeways so I would assume it’s an update on what they’ve been doing with Sandstone. “Color is produced by mixing a range of color materials on the fly, allowing for full, vivid CMYK prints with beautiful gradients and detail. This technology employs dissolvable support materials, removing the need for support sprues and allowing for smoother, more consistent surfaces than ever before. This plastic is similar in durability to our premium plastic material. Faint layer lines may be visible on the surface of the figures, especially in strong direct light.” So it seems like it is a different material,… Read more »
OK this is a kind of inkjet type technology.
It prints in layers and must mix colours as it goes. The support material will be a wax like substance that ‘fills in the gaps and is then dissolved away’
This is a similar technology to what @warcradle @waylandgames use in their studios – it’s pretty flipping advanced.
I wonder if the full colour version is capable of the razor sharp detail their studio achieves?
For technology, the printer that will be used is mentioned in the FAQ:
Mimaki 3DUJ-553
Link to the printer description:
https://www.mimakieurope.com/products/3d/3duj-553/?_ga=2.27318271.293363571.1579089395-41852281.1579089395
Normally i tend to miss such things.^^
And i agree, they look less detailed, then the normal ones.
Thanks for that – thats the printer I suspected 🙂 Printing in Full Colour with over 10 million colours with ICC profiling/proofing Water-soluble support material, which prevent small detailed parts to break Extreme high uptime WYSWYG What You See is What You Get Build size 500 x 500 x 300 mm Transparency for glossy effects Possibility to mix clear and colours to achieve different levels of transparency Existing 3D data of white objects can be easily coloured in 3D Link software Strength of the material is comparable with ABS 3 printing qualities (20 – 32 – 42 micron layering) Smooth… Read more »
I wonder if the ‘low resolution’ / ‘lack of detail’ is merely the result of it being posed next to a painted version ?
The highlights help sharpen the detail quite a bit I think.
It’s not that much softer than the plain plastic version.
Add to this that you’re looking at them at a ridiculously short distance.
I am not totally sure it lower res as a building up of colouring pigment, either way they look okay at best. Still interesting but there is some development still needed
$39 for one mini is a lot of money…
Still cheaper than GW. 😀 I keed, I keed. But if you think a Heroforge miniature is the same as, say, a Forge World miniature, you’re sorely mistaken. First off, these miniatures are for RPG’ers, not wargamers. Wargamers have miniatures that reflect armies created by the publishers, so the miniature you play with looks exactly like the miniature in the army list. But RPG gaming has you customize your character up the wazoo, and, more often than not, you don’t have a miniature that exactly reflects your character, much less have the time or skill to paint them, or seek… Read more »
I suppose it depends how important the mini is to the player.
To me it’s nice to have something identifiable as the PC, but the reality is that it’s just a place marker on the table for the tactical situations.
The real image of the PC is in the mind of the player that created and the words they use to describe it.
Interesting concept, but as has been said, $39 for one model ain’t going to disrupt the market. However, having said that, the project is funded multiple times over already, so I guess there must be a market out there for that level of quality at that kind of price (i.e. more than I imagine you’d probably need to pay for a human being to paint up a single model of your choice to a “tabletop standard”). I guess the customisability of the pose and the attraction of being able to design the colour scheme and sculpt yourself and then just… Read more »
I think for those of us talking about ‘disruptive technologies’ we are not specifically talking about this Kickstarter or even this company. We’re looking more specifically at the technologies that have come together to make it possible. We are basing our optimism on a couple of factors, generally, the price of technologies that have a potential for a mass market will always fall, and often quickly. (Case in point is that resin printers were 50K and I have one at home now that is printing at a quality Im hard-pressed to tell the difference on and it cost less than… Read more »
A lot of the attractiveness of HeroForge comes from the fact that you can create minis that are exactly what you want them to look like, instead of spending hours and hours tracking down minis on obscure websites that match the picture you have in your mind. Another factor is that you can make minis that really don’t exist anywhere else because they only appeal to a niche market, i.e. if you want a mini of a cyborg catgirl pirate with a dragon familiar, it’s feasible here. As for the price and the quality of the colored sculpts, my experience… Read more »
I am sure that if I went to the effort of having the perfect RPG mini sculpted for one of my characters… it would get killed permanently in the next game session…
@osbad people are willing to pay a lot more for a rather staticly posed single avatar of themselves …
https://www.3dgeneration.com/
https://www.instagram.com/p/B5-q0XeIpca/
That’s a 200 – 450 Euro statue …
I would settle for the basic version they will blend in with my figures better. if I had the pro-painted one’s they would stick out a mile.
I’ve backed for 1 miniature came to £35 including postage, purely because I’m curious. In the video on the campaign page the colours look ok, but the print quality doesn’t look the best, but I’ll see.
This discussion right here is one of the great things about this community. I look at something like this and sort of get bits and sort of don’t get bits. But then later on someone explains how the view is different from their perspective and… *kaching* lightbulb moment!
Great stuff guys.
It looks promising, I am addicted to 3D printing and love this approach as well.