Video game scales have always been a weird topic to broach. There are still actual scientists measuring and debating the real-life speed of the original Doom Guy, just the same as there are people who have attempted to recreate the actual real life scale of the weapons from Doom, including the BFG.
The image above comes from the behind-the-scenes video that Bethesda posted up featuring the 3D printing group MyMiniFactory, who took on the task of recreating a life-sized model scale of the BFG from the 2016 version of Doom (though, canonically it is Doom 4 and takes place after Doom 64). The group worked tirelessly to create a real life version of the iconic weapon -- which is considered to be the most powerful weapon in a first-person shooter next to the Davy Crockett -- and they did so after they got a call from Bethesda asking them to make a life-sized version of the BFG.
The MyMiniFactory team had to 3D print each of the pieces to create the sci-fi weapon, which is more than one meter long and is 50 centimeters in height and 50 centimeters in width. That's just a little under two feet high and two feet across, which is insanely huge for a gun. For reference, the real life AT4 rocket launcher used by the U.S. military is also around a meter long but only several inches wide; it's also only a palm's length in height.
One of the questions is likely: how did they know how big the BFG needed to be? Well, they originally were going to use a lot of reference material in relation to Doom and scour the internet to find approximations on scale; very similar to those scientists stuck trying to figure out just how fast the Doom Guy actually runs. However, Bethesda did them one better by sending them over the actual model from the 2016 rendition of Doom.
With the reference material out of the way, the team at MyMiniFactory were then able to take the 3D model and cut it into over 70 pieces. They had to print out each piece using multiple printers. It took more than 1,000 hours for nearly an entire month to print all of the pieces, and more than 35 man hours to construct the BFG.
After going through the painstaking process of printing and constructing the devastating weapon from Doom, the group then had to do a rough assembly by connecting and gluing the pieces together. Once that was finished they then had a painter add the finer details to the project.
It's a cool process that the MyMiniFactory team went through to bring this legendary weapon to life using 3D printing. You can see a time lapse of the creation process from start to finish in the mini-doc below where the designers of the life-sized version of the BFG talk about what they went through to create the weapon and the process required to bring it all to fruition.
3D printing has really come a long way and hopefully we'll get to see more video game weapons brought to life aside the very popular Destiny guns, which seem to get a lot of love in the 3D Printing community. Besides, nothing from Destiny comes anywhere near as close to be being as big as the BFG from Doom.
