Fallout 3/New Vegas prop tutorial- how to get true 1:1 scale!

So let's get straight to it! I'll be showing you how to get 1:1 scale in Pepakura Designer (for papercraft)

First, let's find a gun in New Vegas with a real-world counterpart! In this case, we'll do the 9mm! if you look on the internet movie firearm database (link to site below) it says that the 9mm is based off the Browning Hi-Power Pistol.

Now, if we look up the length of the gun in millimeters, we find out that it is 197mm.


With Pepakura Designer open with the 9mm model loaded, click "unfold" in the toolbar, then you'll see tabs for height, width, and depth. With the model correctly oriented, the length measurement of the Browning Hi-Power will fall into the depth tab in Pepakura Designer.


When you enter the Browning length (197) into that tab, you'll get the true 1:1 scale- which is "9.956462" for that gun! you will have to do this for each gun on the site.

The issue, like GhostMinion says, is that the scales for the pistols are not the same as the scales for rifles or big guns. So if you want to scale a gun like the gatling laser, use a scale from rifles, I recommend getting the scale from the .45 auto smg from the Honest Hearts DLC


I hope you found this useful! Have a great day! please comment if you found this useful, have a question, or want to add anything!!!

link for all New Vegas weapons info:
http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Fallout:_New_Vegas

Hate to say it, but this is a flawed method. Been down this road myself.

Generally speaking, it works good for rifle weapons, probably just as good for the big guns. Does not, however, work for the pistols. The pistols are well oversized in the games, and when you match the scales with the rifle weapons (which I used my real ak-47 compared to the Chinese Assault rifle), the pistols are very large. I found this out with my 12.7mm pistol builds/models. You have to try and compare the pistol size with another pistol, and usually have to wing it. And even then, some portions of the pistol (when printed and in you hands) will seem too small. This happened with my Alien Blaster build, the trigger guard was too small to fit my finger in. "True scale" for most of the pistol models is an illusion, and often you have to go with what you prefer, rather than what is "true".

Also, it's better (if you can) to used a real gun for those base measurements. If a real gun isn't available, you can easily look up the length of that gun on any number of gun enthusiast sites. The problem with 3d models made by others is that you don't know if they got every little dimension correct, and the length could actually be a little off.


You got the right idea, though. We've actually discussed this quite a bit here on the RPF. Better than using a banana for scale!

You're right! I was trying to apply the scale of the 9mm to the riot shotgun, and the riot shotgun was around nine inches long, which is obviously ludicrous. Thank you for the correction!

MLG at DOW said:

You're right! I was trying to apply the scale of the 9mm to the riot shotgun, and the riot shotgun was around nine inches long, which is obviously ludicrous. Thank you for the correction!

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No problem brother! Glad to help, I know it was tricky figuring it out at first, so I relish in the chance to share such knowledge. :thumbsup

GhostMinion said:

No problem brother! Glad to help, I know it was tricky figuring it out at first, so I relish in the chance to share such knowledge. :thumbsup

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So I had an idea, but I'm running into an issue with Pepakura Designer... I was trying to scale the Riot Shotgun, but no luck on finding a real-world counterpart. I did notice, however, that the model had a shotgun shell. so I went into Blender and removed all of the shotgun parts except the shell.

We know that the Riot Shotgun uses 12 gauge shells, which have a diameter of 18.5mm. I figured that if I plugged 18.5 into the width, then that would accurately scale the shell to 1:1, scaling the entire gun. The issue is that Pepakura Designer does not like decimals, only whole numbers. So I can't find out the excact scale. What do you think I should do? Should i just round to 19? that makes the gun 29.4 inches long, which is more reasonable than 9 inches!!! :lol

MLG at DOW said:

So I had an idea, but I'm running into an issue with Pepakura Designer... I was trying to scale the Riot Shotgun, but no luck on finding a real-world counterpart. I did notice, however, that the model had a shotgun shell. so I went into Blender and removed all of the shotgun parts except the shell.

We know that the Riot Shotgun uses 12 gauge shells, which have a diameter of 18.5mm. I figured that if I plugged 18.5 into the width, then that would accurately scale the shell to 1:1, scaling the entire gun. The issue is that Pepakura Designer does not like decimals, only whole numbers. So I can't find out the excact scale. What do you think I should do? Should i just round to 19? that makes the gun 29.4 inches long, which is more reasonable than 9 inches!!! :lol

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Alright, what you want to do is this:

1. If you have a 3d viewer program (I'd recommend Nettfab basic. It's free, and while it's mainly for 3d print prep, it's a great program for these scaling jobs.), load in the .obj for the Chinese Assault rifle, as well as the riot shotgun (or any other rifle weapon you'd like to scale) together.

2. Select only the Chinese Assault rifle. Then scale it to be 34.5 inches long (876 millimeters), but before you actually scale it, record the scale variable that shows up after you type in the length. This scale variable is what you'll use to evenly scale your rifles and big guns. The length of the Chinese Assault rifle comes from my Saiga AK rifle, and you are right, there is no real world counterpart to the riot shotgun. It looks much like a Remington 1100 receiver to me, but I doubt the dimensions hold up to a Remington.

3. Use the scale variable on the riot shotgun, and boom, you've got it.



The shotgun shell idea would be great if you plan to make it so faux shells can load into it. How one would accomplish that is any good inventor's guess. If the scale I described above is any bit close to what the size would be using your shotgun shell trick, I'd personally go with the shell trick. Making the ammo real sized always helps with the realism of the prop.

They have a real world counterpart for the NV riot shotgun here: http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Fallout:_New_Vegas#Shotguns The F4 shotgun is based on a Russian PPSH submachinegun.

I'm just going to use screenshots of characters with the weapon and then scale that person to my height (5' 11'-6'). I figure that should look close. It seems like most games make the male character to be about 6' tall. It would have been a LOT easier if they scaled everything the same and then made the frakking yardstick in the game to scale!

Sluis Van Shipyards said:

They have a real world counterpart for the NV riot shotgun here: http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Fallout:_New_Vegas#Shotguns The F4 shotgun is based on a Russian PPSH submachinegun.

I'm just going to use screenshots of characters with the weapon and then scale that person to my height (5' 11'-6'). I figure that should look close. It seems like most games make the male character to be about 6' tall. It would have been a LOT easier if they scaled everything the same and then made the frakking yardstick in the game to scale!

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The Combat shotgun was based on the PPSH shape, not the Riot Shotgun. According to the link you posted, the Riot Shotgun seems to be based off of what is called the Hawk Semi Auto Tactical shotgun. I've never heard of it until just now.

Also, that page isn't exactly perfect with that info. While some guns are easy to identify, the claim that the Gauss rifle is based off of anything non-fictional is kinda hard to swallow. It looks nothing like the LMG they're comparing it to.

That's why I said the F4 shotgun was based on the PPSH. Yeah I have seen them try to say some fictitious gun is based on something, and it's generally crap. Maybe some designer based one part on something real, but not the entire thing. For example, like if they liked the grip on a certain gun, that's completely different than basing it on the entire gun.

Sluis Van Shipyards said:

........That's why I said the F4 shotgun was based on the PPSH.....

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Ah, I didn't see that. Just assumed, by accident, we were talking about FO3/NV stuff.