What is it?
The Hero Me Builder is a three.js interactive website I created to allow people to easily mock up and compile the STLs for their individualized Hero Me Gen 7 setups. The Hero Me’s biggest turn-away point is the part selection. With over 600 STLs to choose from, new users become inundated and give up before finding out that they only needed a handful of those. Although not perfect, the Hero Me Builder addresses these issues by allowing anyone to quickly and easily assemble the parts as they are supposed to attach. The visualization of the parts as they are meant to align greatly reduces confusion about assembly. The Builder also allows users to save and load back their Hero Me setups to refer back to or modify later, and share with others on the community Discord. Custom community made parts are also supported and provided. I and the Builder are not affiliated with MediaMan3D, who made the Hero Me Gen 7. Credits are given where due for each STL provided from the Builder (even custom ones from other users) in compliance with CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 which the Hero Me Gen 7 is Licensed with.
History
I initially had the idea shortly after finishing my own Hero Me in 2023, but due to lack of coding ability and generally not even knowing where to begin with such a project, I didn’t act on the idea until December of 2024. That’s when I started experimenting with ideas for how to make a system like that. Similar systems have been implemented in video games, so I toyed around with Unity and even Roblox before scrapping those ideas as they would require a download or an account to use. I wanted to make this as freely accessible as possible, so I turned to AI to spit out some ideas on how to work it out. It suggested three.js, a codebase for 3D web applications, so work began. I am not a Javascript developer, and knew far less then than I do now, so Claude Sonnet 3.5 wrote much of the code. The first prototypes were dreadful, not really sure which direction to go in. How would parts know where to attach? It’s so obvious to a human when 4 holes on a model line up, but how does a computer know those are holes and how does it know which way those 4 holes are supposed to line up? The early AI coding ability left much to be desired, it would regurgitate the code you gave it with your requested changes, frequently removing essential parts of the code or giving me unhelpful code snippets my untrained eyes didn’t know what to do with. It is so much harder generating an entire interactive website than generating a funny image. Later iterations of Claude Sonnet would bring improvements that would greatly improve the builder’s functionality, but for the time it was too unpolished to show off.
Moving into January the Builder morphed into a more recognizable form. I accepted the fact that me and Claude couldn’t pull off automatic hole detection, so I made a primitive version of the Marker tool to begin manually marking every relevant circle and face on an STL and saving that info to JSON files for the Builder to reconstruct. The original single-file script had grown into a 3000 line headache by the end of February, and the most polished part of it was the front page. It had grown so large that I could not submit the file to Claude, it exceeded the token limit. So I resorted to sending in snippets of code to fix, which left things without context and made more errors. Out of frustration, I had to shelve the project by March, with plans to revisit later. Soon after, Anthropic released Claude Code, an agentic AI tool to comb through the file system itself and make changes to code. I had just begun heavy development of my Minecraft server at the time so I used it frequently for plugin development. A few months pass and I circle back to the Builder, ready to utilize the new coding abilities of Claude to improve issues that had stonewalled me before. Unfortunately AI did not become cheaper in that time, so the token limit was still a problem. Still, it could read enough of the file to make good changes and improve the builder. In August of 2025 I announced the builder publicly to the Hero Me Community Discord to give me the push to finish polishing and adding parts to the Builder. The immediate support gave me the drive to keep pushing and I even gained some new contributors for part JSONs.
Future
The Hero Me Builder will remain online, free to access, and without ads for as long as I can provide. The source code is on Github should a new host be needed in the future, though I ask that it goes unmonetized in the same fashion. While not all files are compatible, and not all have been marked up or pre-assembled yet, it is closer to done than I ever imagined. The Hero Me Builder does not generate revenue and as such does not run ads, so spread the word. Extended support is also available, for free, on the Hero Me Community Discord.
