Nowadays, it is in fashion to decorate the houses with unique 3D mini sculptures of favorite animals, movie characters, Greek Gods, or even some people who love to have a miniature of their favorite football players. Do you know the most expensive miniature was of L’ Homme au doigt or ‘Pointing Man’ and was sold for US$141.3 million in 2015? It was made by Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti. Apart from decoration, miniatures are also used in game designing and animated movies creation.
With the boom in the latest technology, it is now possible to create a 3D miniature with the help of software, giving it real-time features. Just as Howard made a 3D miniature of Stephen Hawking in ‘The Big Bang Theory’ with the use of a 3D printer. The miniatures can be designed by software and sculpted in a tangible form possessing many real-time features. Often, customers buy them for gifting others.
Egyptians used to make miniatures about 5000 years back with their hands which were not very precise with features but still gave the idea of their time. But now, you can easily create a miniature even of your own and give it a physical form. Multiple software are available that enable you to create miniatures with great precision and detailed features.
Hero Forge
Hero Forge is an online character design software that lets you create in-depth and unique design characters for your tabletops and other uses. It has an extensive library of creative tools that allows you to create high-resolution characters just in your browser. Hero Forge consists of thousands of parts, sliders, customization options, and color design tools to empower your creativity.
It also provides custom 30mm scale tabletops made up of any material of your choice, e.g., plastic or rugged metal. It is a comprehensive tool that lets you be creative with your miniature. However, with increased users, alternatives to every site are mandatory.
List of Hero Forge Alternatives
The alternatives of Hero Forge are given below with their unique characteristics.
1. Anvil.co
ANVIL.CO is comprehensive character design software to help you create your desired miniature with unique and in-depth features and remarkable precision. It contains a list of featured products, i.e., if you want to buy an already designed sculpture or get an idea for your own customized sculpture.
It has categories like Regiments Infantry, Burning Rose, EXO-Lords, GasLands, Boutique, and Digital Forge. These categories further contain items like squads, ranges, bits, ogres, classic handmade products, armory, digital infantry parts, digital characters, and numerous digital bundles.
2. Eldritch Foundry
Eldritch Foundry is another 3D character alternative of Hero Forge, which is comparatively cheaper and has an excellent user-friendly and attractive interface. It also has templates of different fictional characters, which you can alter according to your requirement. It contains categories for face, body, head, clothing, back items, side items, pose, and a base containing numerous features. It enables you to control facial expressions, i.e., happy or sad.
3. Pcgen
Pcgen is another alternate to Hero Forge, and it allows you to design your own character. With the help of 3D printing, it provides you with the actual miniature of it, which can be used as a tabletop or for games like D&D. It is free software. Its interface is user-friendly and provides the best experience in 3D miniature designing.
It is compatible with Pathfinder 1e, Pathfinder 2e (coming), d20 Modern, Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 Edition, Dungeons, and Dragons 5th Edition, Starfinder, and many more. All you need is to get on the site and start making your favorite miniatures.
4. Creature Caster
Creature Caster is another 3D miniature creation site that creates high-quality resin miniatures with in-depth features and precision. This site is free and provides bugs free experience. It helps you assemble your character with its own distinctive features and print it into a tangible miniature. It provides services across the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, and numerous other countries.
The site has numerous categories like gift cards, miniatures, busts, demons, discord, ecstasy, malefica, ruin, tyranny, onslaught, dragons, drakyann, elementals, and orcs. However, you have to be registered at their store to create your own specials.
5. Cults
Cults is a 3D miniature creation site where you can design and buy a lot of different characters, figurines, miniatures, toys, and numerous other objects. Furthermore, it has an extensive database of 65,000 designs and a simple, user-friendly interface. This site is quite famous among comic book lovers, and it helps you add high-quality miniatures to your collectibles.
Several categories are available on it, e.g., art, fashion, jewelry, home architecture, gadget, game tools, and they all contain hundreds of items in them. Thus, it offers an extensive collection of miniatures for a better user experience.
6. MyMiniFactory
MyMiniFactory is a 3D miniature software, and just like the name, it is equipped with numerous fancy tools for creating a high-quality 3D avatar in just a couple of minutes. It also enables you to create fashionable jewelry, toys, decoration pieces, and much more. It contains characters of famous cartoons like Pokemon and famous Marvel movies. Also, you can create your own characters.
It has numerous categories like accessibility, architecture, board games, build a 3D printer, education, fan art, fashion & accessories, gadgets & electronics. Also, a few other categories are home & garden, jewelry, props & cosplay, racing cars, scan the world, spare parts, sports & outdoor, tabletop, and toys and games. Each category contains hundreds of items.
7. Hero mini maker
Hero mini maker is a 3D miniature software that lets you carve 3D creatures with your own unique characteristics and get them at a reasonable price. The interface of the site is user-friendly and straightforward. This site offers high-quality products, and thus sometimes their prices are a bit higher than other sites.
It is a free site, and it provides a range of 100 different character attributes, e.g., helmets, weapons, face expressions, costumes, and a lot more. It lets you create 800 styles and numerous poses in HD quality. You can also add the desired animation to your character and upload it online to get the feedback of others.
8. Gambody
Gambody is a marketplace for 3D miniatures and downloading comic books that lets you create your unique design and sell it on the app yourself. It is exclusively for beginners who are not much familiar with 3D miniature modeling but is also popular among professionals. It contains numerous categories and filters within them.
The site offers a unique tool to create and design models with in-depth details and precision. However, prices sometimes are a bit higher, but then the STL files are available in a complete form which you can use directly, so it is worth it. This marketplace is an excellent alternate for Hero Forge and is used extensively by people.
9. Autodesk Tinkercad
Autodesk Tinkercad is another alternative to Hero Forge and is equipped with numerous tools to design and decorate your miniature in HD quality. It is free software and offers free classes for users who want to learn 3D creative model techniques.
It has a simple interface for a user-friendly experience, but the site does not offer any cash-on-delivery procedure; in order to make a purchase, you have to make a payment in advance. Autodesk Tinkercad provides a comprehensive library of features for your characters, and it also has numerous tools to adjust those features.
10. Thingiverse
Thingiverse is another best hero forge alternative but is quite different from the latter. Instead of selecting and customizing a charterer, the portal also allows you to customize a toy or any artifact. The platform has unique attributes, e.g., with extensive tool collection, you can create the desired object right from the start and polish it to get a final attractive and expected end product. You can either take an idea from someone else’s design or upload the unique one. It lets you get an honest review from the visitor, and you can save and share your ideas through the platform very quickly.
Thingiverse is an app that allows users to get distinctive designs as per their wishes. With numerous models, designs, and products, this app is a piece of cake for creative ones. Comic books or anime characters and other creative showpieces, and valuable 3D gadgets are available on the site for you to enjoy numerous perks of 3D modeling. Although it is a bit time taking, it gives satisfying results. The designs are free, although the printing and shipping charge a buck.
11. Sketchup
SketchUp is a customized miniature website that offers free services to its users. The prices of miniatures are pretty high, but users can pick any desired design and alter the part they want. It is one of the best apps to use, with no additional limitations. This app allows you to create your specific designs, including the base models, and develop an entirely new product. Like Hero Forge, this app serves HD quality miniature, thus ensuring complete customer satisfaction.
Final Words
Formerly, no one imagined having mini sculptures possessing all human-like characters or such in-depth features. But as technology is gradually making an advancement, we are setting trends for our future generation. Hero Forge is the best site for 3D miniature creation; however, all other alternates of Hero Forge are equally compatible and popular among users.
