First Impressions: HeroForge Kitbashing Brings Your Vision to Minis
HeroForge is one of the big names for tools that help you design miniatures for your tabletop games. Over the years, the team behind the tool have introduced new items for customization, the ability to print in color, and now their latest innovation is here: kitbash.
In case you’re unfamiliar, kitbashing is the practice of modifying models and figures, typically by mixing and matching pieces from multiple kits. Kitbash in HeroForge is kind of like that, but not really. HeroForge was kind enough to allow me some time before launch to try it out. All thoughts below are my own.
First things first, kitbash does require you to have a Pro account on HeroForge which starts at about $4 a month. In addition, before you can use kitbash, you do have to take a small little quiz to make sure you understand that there are rules you have to abide by or the print just simply will not work.
This includes having really small parts, parts that are out of bounds, floating parts, and a couple of others. Overall, it’s not a big deal and it is helpful to make sure that those aspects are in your mind as you’re playing around with kitbash.
As I already mentioned, kitbash on HeroForge is different from what many think of. Because there aren’t multiple models that you break apart and combine, I do feel like it’s a little bit of a misnomer. However, you can do a lot of things to modify the figure.
Basically, when you enter kitbash, your figure gets a skeleton with key points at the various joints and select other areas. You can click on a point and then you have three main controls: translate (aka move), rotate (aka turn), and scale (aka resize). This allows you to play around with proportions on your figure, the overall shape of the figure, and more. And those are just the basics.
If you want to get even more in-depth, you totally can! There’s an Add tool that lets you add almost anything from HeroForge’s library to the scene. There are a few reasons why you want to do this. The first is if you want something in a place that you normally would not be able to put it.
For example, you can add a tail to the scene and have it be something that your character holds like a weapon or trophy instead of having it be a part of their body. Second, when you add things in kitbash, they typically have more editability.
One example I ran into was with capes. If I put a cape on as a back item then it was static. If I added a cape via kitbash, it then had some skeletal points that allowed me to edit it for a more personalized look and feel.
The third, and probably coolest, thing that kitbash allows you to do is create brand new things from scratch. This is really where the rabbit hole exists in my experience. For example, I wanted to let my figure have a spider staff.
However, HeroForge doesn’t have any. Heck, they don’t even have any spiders. So what did I do? I was able to take a multitude of pieces and combine them to make a small spider-like thing. I then combined that with one of HeroForge’s staves to get a spider staff that, while it’s not perfect, is something.
I’ve shared a screenshot of my creation below and I know that there are people who will be able to do some of the craziest things with this tool.
One problem I’ve run into with Kitbashing is that it is not very good at directing you to the problems your model has. When you go to Check, it checks your figure for printability and warns you of problems but I’m not sure where the different problems come from. It will highlight some items in red, but that doesn’t always tell you where the problem lies. For example, I get the warning that the figure has small parts and I delete the pieces that I added so it’s just the figure with stock HeroForge items and I still have that small parts error. I don’t know if it’s because of some change to the figure’s positioning or if there’s a hidden object that I’m missing or if there’s something else. I wish I could click on the error message and it would show me exactly what the problem with the model is.
Kitbash is a really fun tool that HeroForge has done a good job of implementing. There are a few things that I want them to work on such as adding more joints to some items and making it more helpful at identifying what the problems with the mini are. However, I think that kitbash is a very welcome tool for people to enjoy and really make their minis look even more like a player’s vision. I’m really excited to see the crazy things that people make with this!
