Mimic Miniatures has a Kickstarter going on now that you really need to check out. They’ll take a 3D scan of your head and place it on a miniature appropriate for tabletop play.
It really needs to be seen to be believed, but this is the future of 3D printing and gaming.
And they’re making a helluva go of it.
There’s three days left and you can get all kinds of goodies with through their Kickstarter. I spoke to Rich Nelson, one of the guys behind the project, about why it’s so special:
Big Shiny Robot!: For someone who might not have seen the Kickstarter, explain what you do and how you do it?
Rich Nelson: We create personalized game miniatures that can be used in nearly any RPG, board game or table top miniatures game. Imagine coming to your gaming table with a miniature of you as the hero.
How we create the miniatures involves essentially some pretty cool technology and a 3d printer. We use a gray resin that is very similar to what you’ll find in most commercial miniatures and print out the mini from models we’ve created. We’ll take a gamer’s face and put it on one of Mimic Miniature classes that we currently have. For example, you can choose to be a warrior, cleric, pirate etc. Our miniatures are 28mm heroric scale (i.e. warhammer, hordes, warmachine) but can be scaled down a bit to accommodate other games like Infinity.
BSR!: If you’re already succesfully doing it, why kickstart it?
RN: Brett [Peterson, his partner] and I thought the best place to gain a lot of immediate exposure and crowd sourced funding would be via Kickstarter. The funds raised helps us make more miniatures to offer to our fans. It also lets us gauge what the demand would be from the gaming community. Naturally, the more successful the project is the more we can expand our offerings.
BSR!: What made you guys want to embark on this?
RN: We both love gaming, especially miniature gaming. We talked about how cool it would be to have a miniature of yourself as the hero or a whole unit of you (i.e. zombies of you) or clone warriors. After discussing this at length, we really got excited at the prospect having a personalized miniature of you would be to use in different games. We took about a year to get all the technology to work and here we are!
BSR!: What games do you use these for play?
RN: Really any game. We’ve made some universal miniatures that can be used in fantasy, steam punk, sci-fi, Lovecraftian, pirates, modern games and more. For example, take any of the popular zombie survival games out there – imagine you as one of the survivors or as a swarm of zombies. We see gamers using our Miniatures in their favorite table top and RPG games as well. We have an option where our backers can also order heads of themselves to fully customize any favorite miniature of theirs.
BSR!: Why should people jump in now, rather than after the kickstarter is over and the company is on its feet?
RN: Great question. We want Mimic Miniatures to grow and offer even more options to gamers – we’re already technically on our feet so now is the best time to back this great idea. The Kickstarter project really helps “fund” the ability to grow this dream of ours and spend more resources on making more and better sculpts. It’s also a very unique project and have received tremendous support and encouragement from gamers everywhere.
And so there you have it. Go jump on the kickstarter now! I kicked in for some figures, you should, too.