We can push the limits and go even more crazy - Benoit interview about 3D Printing and Heroes Infinite

We can push the limits and go even more crazy - Benoit interview about 3D Printing and Heroes Infinite

A month ago we started this great new adventure with a Patreon for 3D Printable miniatures, featuring awesome Pirates in April, and giant Spiders are coming in May...

You might be curious to learn more about how Raging Heroes is approaching this new field of 3D printing, and all the questions related: what can we expect in the future, details about the STL files, what about these new characters in our regular shop, etc...

Gerry at OnTableTop / Beasts of War recently just did an interview with our Creative Director Benoît Guerville, here's an excerpt of the text:

Gerry: Benoit we've seen a lot of people getting to grips with the pirate range for Heroes Infinite, what has the move from physically producing a miniature to producing the STL files allowed you to do that wouldn't have been possible before?

Benoit: First of all what is great with 3D printing is that we don’t have any more limits regarding the size of the miniatures we can create. So something like the pirate boat would have never seen the light of the day if it wasn’t an STL file to print. Because it’s a really cool model but because of it’s price if it was manufactured in resin, it would too be expensive for a lot of our customers. With STLs (3D printable files) we can have any crazy super cool idea and make it, and that”s awesome! That's the biggest thing I think.

Also, there’s a specific size of miniature that’s difficult to manufacture in a way where you can sell it at a fair price and still be profitable. Like the giant crab or a regular size tank, for example, the kind of model you see on the market around 40 to 50 €, this is very hard to make work unless you manufacture tens of thousand units in plastic. But with 3D printing, we can do that no problem.

The second thing is that we can push the limits and go even more crazy in the complexity of the miniature. We don’t have the constraints of mould making, so we can make parts that are much more in volume and create complex arrangements. For example, you’ll notice we like super crazy long hair on our models, here we can go even crazier with swirling shapes. We’re still experimenting so we didn't go too far yet but you can be sure that in the future we are going to make some parts that have a level of 3Dimensionality that we can not easily make in regular physical models.

G: Will we ever see the sculpts available through the Heroes Infinite Patreon be physically produced for collectors who don't have access to a 3D printer, or are they planned to be solely a digital product?

B: Yes you will definitely see miniatures from the Patreon in our regular physical webshop (resin models) at one point. It’s still a bit hard to say exactly how it’s going to happen at the moment because of the reasons I mentioned previously. First thing: some miniatures are way too big to manufacture at a reasonable cost, even if we are looking at some possibilities, right now it’s not yet feasible easily.

And a second thing: some miniatures we will have to rework them a bit. They won’t be castable in a way that makes them either cost-effective or easy enough to assemble. And sometimes it’s just on very simple things. Like when we make a physical miniature we tend to have a leg and the coat behind it, and we press the coat against the leg so there’s no gap that would create a problem in the mould, but with 3D printing, we can have this gap. So it’s the kind of details we might have to rework.

Once again make sure to join the group here, to follow the plans for the miniatures.

Read the full interview here !
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Photos of the Pirates of The White Sea

We were amazed by the great response and how fast our community started printing and painting these new characters. Click the photo below for more images!