New miniatures from Hero Forge will include adjustable facial features

Prior to 2014, the options for creating custom character miniatures for your Dungeons & Dragons or other roleplaying group were extremely limited. While there are plenty of creatures to find, bringing them together was a challenge. The following are some of the ways to get in touch with us.It was almost impossible to bring the dragonborn ranger into life in a 28-millimeter figure. Hero Forge was launched in December that same year.

Hero Forge is one of the pioneering companies in 3D printing custom miniatures. The company’s founders used their experience from working for years in the video games industry to create a pipeline that allows characters concepts to be turned into actual art by using a simple web browser. It is now taking the technology one step further, adding a full-featured facial customizer. The final version should be available in August.

Teagan Morrison worked for more than a decade as a digital artist at Naughty Dog before founding Sky Castle Studios, Hero Forge’s parent company. He is therefore intimately acquainted with the difficulties of converting digital artwork into tangible objects. The complexity of the Face Customizer initially caught him off guard.

“[When]We Kickstarted our original Hero Forge. It took us an entire year with just a few people to create. [This was] a magnitude more than that, just because we had to develop new techniques and new technology for this,” Morrison told Polygon in a recent interview. “It was more difficult than the original Hero Forge was to make in its entirety”

This new feature will allow you to customize the face of any head, even robots and animals. To avoid any clipping problems, it also integrates accessories, hairstyles, and pointy ears of elfs. Each element can be controlled by dozens of sliders. Users can also grab the features they wish to move and simply drag them. There’s even a slider for adjusting the age of a character. The miniaturized objects can be exported to STL files and used in home 3D printers, printed in different materials or captured using the browser photo booth.

Morrison acknowledges, of course, that the custom faces are only useful when they’re printed at a mere few millimeters in height. Morrison said that while hobbyists can produce miniatures in larger sizes, such as sculptures the size of busts, they will find the greatest benefit when rendering their characters for virtual tabletop platforms. Hero Forge has already been integrated into multiple 3D applications such as Talespire You can also find out more about the following: Foundry VTTHe also said Hero Forge Miniatures will be simple to transfer once the solution becomes available in August.

“We’re expecting a small number of power users to do amazing, amazing work and to share [that work] to all of our users,” Morrison said. “We’re really looking forward to what users come up with.”