The idea behind this project was simple: show people how to make their own custom 3D character models without needing any prior modeling experience. The maker did that by walking through DesktopHero3D, a web app for building posable, scalable minis, and taking characters all the way from the browser to a painted figure on the table. Everything shown was designed, printed and painted by the maker, which is exactly the kind of end-to-end demo I want from a tutorial.
The workflow itself is nicely laid out. You design a character using tabs for Appearance, Pose, Presets and Character, save the design, export the STL, and send it off to a printer. The results on display cover a lot of ground: soldiers standing, sitting and prone, one figure riding in a toy jeep, and painted archers and mages set out on a terrain board. A purple twenty-sided die sits next to one miniature for scale, and some minis were done at 20mm while others came out at 25-28mm. The maker also ran a comparison against Hero Forge, pointing out that the paid option charges for STL files and is missing some sitting poses. For anyone wanting seated drivers for something like Gaslands, that seems like a meaningful gap in the alternative.
The standout practical details for me are the print settings talk. High detail apparently needs a layer height of 50 microns or lower, test prints ran at 60mm/s, and slowing things down to 30mm/s made a huge difference. Printing on the base is another tip worth noting, since it almost always gives the best detail.
It is not all solved, though. The maker had poor results with Cura tree supports, which created extra cleanup work, and the granite-like look on some minis came from a bad first Zenithal priming attempt. Digital design takes five to fifteen minutes and prints run roughly two to three hours, so there is still tuning to do, and the maker admits the app is not perfect yet even if it can do cool things.
Project by 3D Printed Tabletop. Watch it on their YouTube channel: