I recently ordered some custom miniatures from Heroforge.com. They cost about $20 and I am happy with the ones I have received so far.
I also discovered a site called Anvl.co. They appear to charge only $10 for their minis and have a different (not necessarily better or worse) set of customization options than Heroforge does.
So, last Saturday, I put in orders with both of them for very similar minis. I hope to be able to compare the quality and speed of delivery for these minis later this month. So far Anvl.co has the advantage on price but may be at a disadvantage on speed of delivery (as they are located in England and both Heroforge and I are located in the US).
Does anyone here know of any other sites that create custom minis that might be worth checking out?
I've gone a slightly different direction. I bought a resin-based 3D printer. $300 US, and the resin and alcohol costs are negligible. You can buy STLs of anything you design on Heroforge and self-print (sometimes they offer STLs at $8 US). Also, there are tonnes of 3D printable minis out there to snag which are free.
One guy in particular puts out incredible content.
Miguel Zavala
https://www.shapeways.com/designer/mz4250
I know this doesn't directly answer your question, but it's related and might be helpful.
Resin printing isn't as difficult or messy as some of the reviews suggest. I've been printing stuff for my groups for a while now. The quality is excellent... at least the same as what you get from Heroforge.
There are ways to do minor edits on a model, such as removing or changing carried items, but I haven't delved into that yet.
Thanks! I may consider doing that when there are more local places that can handle 3D printing. As is the case with standard printers, I would prefer to let someone else deal with the headache of maintaining machines that I only occasionally need to use.
Incidentally, yesterday and today I received orders from Heroforge and Anvl.co. Both came from Shapeways in Queens, NY -- so that seems to be the place of production for the northeastern US. Since the Heroforge order I received was a previous order and they are giving a delivery date of October 11th for the competitive order I set up per my first post, Anvl.co handily won in terms of speed of delivery.
The only advantage that Heroforge still has is in terms of level of detail. The minis I received from Anvl.co seem to compare to Reaper Bones minis in terms of appearance and level of detail. Assuming that I can get something acceptable from either of the two, I would probably go with Heroforge for PCs and Anvl.co for foes.
And for anyone else reading this thread, here is a clickable link to Miguel Zavala's designs. I am now off to check them out.
Another suggestion if you don't want to do your own printing is 3dhubs.com It's kind of a "have printer, will print" type organization. I wanted something I found on Thingiverse printed (the STL was free), and a local printer did it for me. It was actually operating out of the university in my city... the engineering department has a printer and they're allowed to use it to do community stuff. It was cheap.
Interesting. It looks like the 3D printing field is getting more competitive, so I might consider getting STL files when there is a service local to me. Thanks for the tips!
For anyone following my contest, Heroforge took one week longer to deliver the minis, not the estimated two extra weeks. As expected, they beat Anvl.co for quality of the minis but lost on speed and cost.
Hero Forge seems to be stepping up to the next level.
In about a week or so they are launching a new Kickstarter
Fully colored printed figs.
Being cheap, I always preferred to find a cheap, best-fit mini I could buy at a store and then perform a conversion. Happy to offer advice on how to do that, but it does require time, tools, and patience, and I understand that some would just rather get the perfect fig from the get-go.
It is fascinating what can be done with 3D printers though.
I am looking forward to seeing what they come up with for colored minis. I hope that it is possible to provide obvious basic colors for a reasonable price.
It looks like there is only a limited time to get in on this -- and they are having no trouble raising the pledges.
They had a goal of $42,000 that they had to raise within a month.
They raised $1,000,000 the first day.
By the way, over on enworld.org I saw a mention that this kickstarter blew away the one for Eldritch Foundry. Has anyone else done anything with that site? I won't be able to do anything with it until this evening.
After checking out Eldritch Foundry last night, I don't see how they can compete with Heroforge. They charge twice as much for fewer options, and even if their minis are of higher quality (something that I am really not competent to evaluate), Heroforge will easily overtake them by this summer even in that regard.
Heroforge has definitely outpaced Eldritch Foundry in terms of raising money for a Kickstarter.
I was trying to give Eldritch Foundry the benefit of the doubt as to what could justify them attempting to compete with Heroforge, and quality of the minis was the only remote possibility that I could come up with.
At least Anvl.co has the niche of creating Reaper Bones quality minis at half the price that Heroforge charges for their cheapest minis.
sure hope Hero Forge can handle the huge bundle of work coming up.
Their announced delivery time for their cheapest minis has slipped to the 5-6 week range from (I think) 2-3 weeks previously.
But they have been doing a fair amount of hiring to cover the new work that they now have well over two million dollars of advance funding for (according to their Twitch video about the Kickstarter). I am really looking forward to seeing how things work out once they settle into their new routine later in the year.
Here is the announcement that many of us have been waiting for
In short: Heroforge color tools become available to the general public on Tuesday, September 29th.
To those of you who didn't back the Kickstarter: You are in for a treat.
To those who did back the Kickstarter: Our new benefit will be early access (by one week) to the Treasure Tuesday updates.
I did back the Heroforge Kickstarter but haven't been paying close attention to the updates. What's Treasure Tuesday?
Basically, they add something new every Tuesday. This week it was sci-fi backpacks. Sometimes it is something bigger -- for example, one week they added fox people (new race, sometimes called kitsune) along with the associated body parts as well as the option for multiple tails (up to 9).
Oh, okay. I knew they'd been adding new options periodically, just didn't know it was weekly or that they had a name for it.
Tuesdays are just when they are (almost) guaranteed to add something. They do occasionally add a single item between Tuesdays as bonus content, but they are trickier to catch because they don't usually announce the smaller additions on Facebook. However, if you are on their mailing list, they do send out a monthly e-mail enumerating everything they added in a given month.
Heroforge 2.0 is out now, since Monday evening. There were actually some major updates even from the point of view of us Kickstarter backers. Apparently they added a bunch of things so that we could re-create that sample mini of the winged adventurer with fox familiar from their Kickstarter page.
Also -- The price of color minis is unchanged from the Kickstarter at $45 each for standard size.