Hero Forge’s New Kitbashing Feature Lets You Make Beautiful Monsters and Sexy Heroes

Hero Forge has taken the training wheels off (in alpha at least) and is giving you more creativity than ever with your minis.

Almost a decade ago, Hero Forge threw open the doors to custom miniatures. Suddenly, you didn’t have to hope for the best when looking for a miniature with the right combination of outfits and equipment, because you could create and “sculpt” your character, posed and dressed way you envisioned them.

And now that creativity goes even further. Hero Forge’s new Kitbashing feature lets you do what you had to do if you wanted to customize your miniatures in real life. Only instead of carefully carving off hands to repose them and fill in the gaps with green stuff and bits from other miniatures, you can reach in and mess with the digital bones of your miniature, letting you get the pose and clothing and equipment you want. The only limit is your imagination. And also the parts that are available to you. And your ability.

Just like real life!

Hero Forge’s Kitbashing Will Steal Hours From Your Life (in All the Best Ways)

Hero Forge graciously offered us early access to play with Kitbashing, and let me say, right from the jump, it is a robust set of customization options. And it’s very freeing to be able to find the bits you want and just start working with them directly in your miniature. I have heard stories of the sort of user-side 3D kitbashing that resulted in people merging miniatures and removing extra heads and arms to get the armor pieces they want.

Now you can just grab whatever bits you want and then some. Here’s a quick overview of the features. Pictured above is a very simple miniature just to highlight some of the flexibility without overwhelming you. In Kitbashing, you gain access to the sort of skeletal structure of the model and have a surprising amount of control over the posing. But don’t take my word for it, check out Hero Forge’s Kitbashing tutorial:

The flexibility is astounding. They can make three Kobolds in a trench coat. We have the technology. It’s here, it’s real, and again, just to stress, this is all still in alpha. Which means it’s only going to get better/smoother for you as you continue to make your minis.

As you’ll see in the tutorial you not only can pose the miniature(s) the way you want, you can scale different features. Do you want your guy to have long knife hands? Elongate the fingers on an armored gauntlet. Tired of trying to make top and bottom pieces fit together? You can scale the “Hero Forge Lip” to look more like something you want to play with.

You can really go nuts with it. Here’s a different miniature. This one from a campaign I ran once—a moment when a character underwent a magical ascension. I only scratched the surface here. But you can see I added some flaming arms coming up out of the sand, and repositioned them where I needed them to be.

But that’s just the very basic stuff. Grasping arms? That’s child’s play. This is a kitbashing toolkit. That means doing some actual mashing of kits, right? It’s so easy to do.

For instance, what about a more dramatic waist moment. The death disciple skirt is dramatic, and you can see I’ve reposed it to be a little more fluttering in the magical breeze as our character here is lifted up into the heavens. But, what if instead we did something like taking the “shinobi scarf” and turned it into a flowing skirt instead.

That’s much more dramatic. And again, just very basic stuff. I am not much of a 3d sculptor. I’ve never been the kind of artist who creates cool symbols or sprays in games. In Armored Core 6, which has a robust sigil editor, I couldn’t tell you how people get their emblems to emerge from a pile of triangles, semicircles, and some flags all mashed together and carefully edited. But even for me, this feels cool. Hero Forge’s Kitbashing invites exploration. It invites experimentation.

There are safeguards too—before you start kitbashing in Kitbashing, you have to take a quiz to acknowledge that if you want to 3d print your miniature, it has to be physically possible and viable. Even if it isn’t, you might still be able to get the STL files for your own printer—as long as there are no “floating parts”.

You can play on so many different axes. You can rotate a part omnidirectionally. It takes a little bit of getting used to. My first hour with Kitbashing was spent trying to figure out how to make things move the way I wanted them to. But it gets easier. The controls are intuitive. And with a tutorial to help you along the way? You’ve got it made in the shade. One of the biggest things here, is being able to move the legs around.

This may not look like much. But it is huge to be able to lift a foot off the ground. Or to alter the way the legs are spaced, or resting. Just as an example, with this miniature, I can transform an ascending ritual to a menacing prance.

You can even add a support to the foot to make sure that they’re firmly attached. And this is all just the beginning. As the community grows, so will the resources and knowledgebase available to new users and experienced users alike. If I can make something like this in the span of a few hours, imagine what you can do with days or weeks spent to sculpt your perfect character. Especially when it’s so easy to undo your mistakes.

And you will make them. Grabbing the wrong joint. Moving one thing that cascades into several others—there’s a lot of little pieces and moving parts that are interconnected. But! Often those same “mistakes” make you aware of new ways of posing things or where you could add something that had previously been missing.

The possibilities are absolutely astounding. All I’ve done is mess with humanoids so far, but if you’ve used Hero Forge at all in the last decade, you know how robust they get. You can make monsters. Lizard people. Merfolk. Merlizard people. Let your imagination go wild, Hero Forge has opened up an incredible sandbox.

Of course, for now, Kitbashing is only available for Pro/Pro+ subscribers. So you’ll want to check your subscription if you’re looking to play around with the new features. But if you are the kind of person that loves making miniatures, loves customizing the look of your character, then it’s already worth it.

Kitbashing is a new feature for Pro/Pro+ subscribers that levels up the customization experience on Hero Forge®. With a vast array of items and features that can be placed anywhere on the mini, creators have more freedom than ever before to create bespoke miniatures that represent their character’s unique, personalized stories. Similar to physical miniature kitbashing, our version allows you to create a completely customized miniature by placing any item anywhere on the mini.

-Hero Forge

Happy kitbashing!

Bell of Lost Souls Staff Writer and DM, J.R. covers RPGs of all stripes and on occasion eats sandwiches. You can ask him about either at [email protected]

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