3D AI Generators for Miniatures.

 Review of 3d Figure AI generators.

I buy a lot of 3d files to print, and love the manufacturers that I purchase from.  At times though, I can't find what I am looking for.  So, from time to time I use an AI 3d generator to create some of the figures I can't get on my own.

I tried my hand at digital sculpting, but don't have the time to master it, so this is a good option...

I have tried 4 different generators, and here is a brief review of them.

MeshyAI  Link

HunyuanAI (A website in Chinese)  Link

Hitem3d   Link

Tripo3d  Link

A few notes about the generators.

Meshy AI - Has a paid version which gives multiple generations per month.  It costs about 20 points to generate.  Their Version 6 is still in test, but is quite good.

Hunyuan - This one is completely free, but you don't have a license on the figures.  It is good for personal use.

Hitem3d - No free version, and can be the most expensive.

Tripo3d - You get some free credits to start with, but you need the pro to do anything good.

Some Images.  

I used this same image to create figures in all of these.

This is the base image that I used.  Note that the image doesn't show the entirety of the feet.  That comes to play in a couple of these.

This first image is a group shot of all of them.  The first is Hitem.  Second is Hunyuan.  Third is Meshy, and fourth is Tripo.  

I think the first three all did a good job of generting a figure.  The last one is the Tripo, and I have tried it a few times and never gotten a great result.  

Hitem.

Here is a front shot of the Hitem.  It does a nice job on faces and has smooth textures where it needs them and sharp features where they are needed.  It did a great job.

The face is good, but not great.

However, it doesn't have a lot of creativity.  The image didn't have the full feet, and this figure was done in exactly the same way.

The lack of creativity comes to play in the back area.  here it did well with the hair, but the bottom of the cloting is just flat.

Hunyuan

Hunyuan did a great job on the details of the face, and smooth textures.  It did a great job of creating the rivets or buttons for the armor.

Once again, it didn't create the feet.

The back was very similar to the Hitem. Decent hair texture, but lack of detail on the clothing.

Meshy

Meshy did a great job on the front.  It had smooth details.  It is more creative than the others, so it added the entirety of the feet.  

It doesn't always catch all of the fine details, such as the buttons on the armor, but it is still quite good.

Meshy did the best on the back.  It used a bit of creativity and modivied the clothing and has good looking hair.  It will print well and be able to paint well.

Tripo

I did a slight close up of this one.  The face was horrible.  The textures not right anywhere.  It looks like a horribly deformed person.

It did an ok job on the hair, and clothing, but still looks bad.  

Overall, I haven't gotten a single useful figure out of Tripo.  I can't recomend it in the least!

Conclusion

For a free product, Hunyuan does a great job.  Hunyuan and Hitem have one feature that Meshy doesn't have yet.  The ability to do images from different angles.  You can do sides, front and back.  That way you can get the results you want, which would have helped on the backsides of the miniatures that I created with them.

Hitem did good, but not great.  The face wasn't quite right, but the armor and everything else looked good.  However, its price is rather high.  

Overall, Meshy is probably the best working product right now, because the AI does a good job of filling in the missing parts.  

New Star Wars Figs

 I haven't posted in a while, so here is a new post.  I have been doing some 3d printing and painting.  I am making figs for a WEG Star Wars RPG that we are starting.

Here are some of the figs that we have.  These are from a few different sources.  Skullforge Studios, Dark Fire Designs, Anvil Rage, War Bear, and Black Remnant.

One of my favorite things about Black Remnant is that they are doing a lot of more generic figures that are great for RPGs.  Most of the others have great troops and characters, but mostly from the movies and TV shows.

Here is an old WEG Rebel Trooper to see the scale.

The guy on the right is one of the characters in our campaign

Of course you need Stormtroopers.  I will need to redo this photo because the light really messed this up!

These thugs cause problems in our first adventure!

Heroforge vs Titan Craft

Design your own miniatures! 

If you do 3d print for miniatures, eventually, you will probably want the chance to design and print your own miniatures.

Well, there are two basic ways to go about this.  You can learn to do 3d sculpting and work at creating miniatures or modifying existing miniatures that way.  There are several apps to do that with, but two free options are Meshmixer and Blender.  Blender is an incredibly powerful 3d tool, but has a pretty steep learning curve.  Meshmixer has a lot less options, but is somewhat easier to learn.  I have used that a lot to modify existing 3d models.

https://meshmixer.com/

https://www.blender.org/

There are also commercial ones available that can get expensive quick.

Whichever you use, it can be a time consuming process.  I regularly use Meshmixer to change weapons, or add attachments, or preassemble miniatures for printing.  Sculpting on the other hand becomes a lot more tedious.  In Blender you can modify and shape not just by sculpting, but you can go to the individual points or pixels and move them around.  Much more fine control, but even more time consuming and a lot of learning.

Option #2

There are a few 3d modeling applications that are available online.  They have everything that you need to rapidly create characters, though you are somewhat limited to the items that they have available to create those characters.

Hero Forge

The most established software is probably Hero Forge.

https://www.heroforge.com/

Hero Forge has a very easy interface to use and a lot of great features.  As you can see, you can even color your miniatures and order it printed if you would like.  You can do a lot with posing of the figure and changing outfits, weapons and a lot of other things.

This lets you make the character of your dreams, and it isn't just for fantasy, they have modern and sci fi gear available also.

The downside of this is that you have to pay for each miniature, and it is often more expensive than buying a pre created miniature from the store or online.  There are options to buy bulk credits which help drop that cost a lot.

You are also somewhat limited by the gear, and features that they have, which is pretty impressive, but still might not have exactly what you are looking for.

Some people also find the figures to be a bit cartoonish at times.

Titan Craft

https://titancraft.com 

Titancraft is another great option, and I actually like this one even more than Hero Forge.  With Titancraft, you can create individual figures and buy them like you can with Hero Forge.  However, Titancraft also allows you to buy "Digital Packs".  You buy a pack of items or assets and then you can use them to make as many figures as you want within that area.  For instance, they have a Fantasy Pack, that has over 180 items such as clothing or armor, and weapons.  That currently costs about $31, and with that you can create and download as many figures as you want!

I currently have a small army of soldiers that I have made as well as many characters.

The greatest thing about Titancraft is that you have the greatest possibility of poses that I have seen.  You can manipulate almost every little detail down to the fingers.

One of the problems that I have with Hero Forge is that you can't move the feet or legs, but here there is no limit to what you can do.  You can even combine multiple characters.  (you can do this and make some naughty poses. 😉

Now, the downside of Titancraft...  They don't have the same volume of assets that Hero Forge does, so you are somewhat limited.  For instance, for bows, they only have 3 different variants.  

TitanCraft Bows

Hero Forge on the other hand has about 15 available.  If you want a more "Historical"  looking bow, you are currently out of luck with Titancraft.

(I don't have a picture of Hero Forge's offerings because it won't fit on one screen!)

However, Titancraft is constantly expanding what they offer and you can make suggestions, so hopefully they will be adding more items.

Which is better?

It doesn't matter what you can create if the  print quality isn't good.  I have downloaded the free figures from Hero Forge, and have created some of my own figures from Titancraft.  I print on a Anycubic Photon Mono X.  The figures that I printed from Titancraft look quite good.  The ones from Hero Forge are also quite good.  In fact, I would put the quality of the prints up with figures that I have from a few different creators.  I have some from Medburry Miniatures and from The Printing Goes Ever On.

https://www.myminifactory.com/users/Medbury%20Miniatures

https://www.theprintinggoeseveron.com/shop/

I would say that the quality of print/design is just as good, however, since you are using pre done assets, you won't be able to get the same level of originality as you can with someone who crafts their own miniatures, but you will be quite happy with using them together on the game table.

Printed Results

Sorry, my painting skills aren't great, and my photography doesn't do these justice, but here are some examples.

Hero Forge                                  Titan Craft

The figures below are primed but not painted.  I didn't want my somewhat poor painting skills to influence the image.  A bad painter can make a good miniature look bad while a good painter can make a poor miniature look fairly good.

They have an ink wash to bring out their detail.  

Titan Craft dwarf to show detail of chain mail

Heroforge Paladin

Hero Forge Titancraft Heroforge

You can see the detail on the Heroforge

One of the reasons I like Titan Craft is the ability to pose figures together!

 Star Wars 3d Print figs

I mainly game in 15mm because of space.  I have seen a lot of good looking Star Wars STL files, but I have been worried about how they would scale down to 15/18mm.  I did a couple of test prints and they came out good, but somewhat brittle.  I have found that there is better, somewhat flexible resin and now I have been getting better results.

I have a mix of figures from some different manufacturers.  

Skullforge Miniatures - Link

Warbear Miniatures - Link

Dark Fire Designs - Link

Anvil Rage Studios - Link

These miniatures are designed for Star Wars Legion scale, but they scale down rather well.  I scale down to 47% which prints them at about 18mm.  

Some Misc. Characters.

Corporate Security Troops

Imperial Army Biker

Imperial Army Troopers

Some Rebel Troopers

More Rebel Troopers

Rebel Army So Far

Imperial Stormtroopers with leaders.

Imperial Stormtroopers with a tank!

The joy of 3d printing!

 At Christmas my wife gave me a Creality 3 Pro filament printer.  I loved it so much that I purchased an Anycubic Photon a couple of months ago.  I have been fiddling a lot with them this summer and have been very pleased with what I am getting.

I printed my first few sci-fi buildings because I needed an alleyway for a Star Wars RPG battle.  I printed some sci-fi dumpsters, and some crates for cover.  

Here is a selection of buildings.  The first one is from 

The following buildings are from Corvus Games Terrain Link to Corvus Games(I think they actually made the prior building also, but not sure about that)

This is from their MidRim City range.  They are fairly inexpensive.  You can buy a small set of STLs for about the price of an individual building from many makers.  I have scaled them down to 15mm.  

They are created in stories, but they don't have floors on them, so you either have to make some kind of floor, or glue the stories together as I have done.

From my resin printer I have done some micro armor.  I have micro armor Star Wars and historicals.  Here is a GHQ Abrams tank next to a printed one for comparison.  The printed one is on the left.  The quality is amazing!  The sculpting from GHQ is a tad bit more detailed, but for micro armor, both look amazing!

More 15mm Star Wars

In some of my previous posts, I have shown some 6mm Star Wars stuff.  Well, the Stormtroopers looked so good that I thought they might look good even at a larger scale, so I asked Wakes Emporium if they would scale some up to 15mm, and sure enough, he did that for me.  The end result is quite good!

Here are a few painted up.  My painting skill isn't perfect, but I think these came out pretty well.

I have been using Ground Zero Games 15mm Stargrunt figs for my rebels.  They have some that make good proxies for Rebel Fleet Troops. 
https://shop.groundzerogames.co.uk/15mm-stargrunt/infantry/islamic-federation-if.html

The Stormtroopers are found here...
Wakes Emporium on Shapeways

The Good...
There are a ton of varieties of the Stormtroopers.  The details are quite good, and the weapons as well as uniforms are easy to make out.  There are standard troopers as well as officers and heavy weapons.  One that I would like to see, but isn't there yet is a tripod mounted heavy blaster.

The figs run at about 17mm in height.  The Ground Zero figs are about 1mm taller, and are just a tad beefier.  Up close you can see that, but when they are at a slight distance (as in a firefight!), it is hard to notice the difference.

The Bad...
The price!  Shapeways is somewhat expensive to buy from.  I use these for Star Wars Miniatures Battles, so you need 3-10 squads of them, and it starts to add up after a bit.

I would also like to see other figs added in.  It would be great to have some Imperial Officers as well as scout troopers.  As far as the sculpting goes, I can't find any negatives about them!