De BFG (wat staat voor Big Fucking Gun) speelt een grote rol in de DOOM (recensie) video games en doet zijn naam ook meer dan eer aan. Nu heeft Bethesda de MyMiniFactory benaderd met de vraag of deze een real size BFG konden 3D printen. Dit is ze perfect gelukt en hoe dit is verlopen kan je niet alleen hier lezen, maar ook bekijken in de onderstaande video.

"Wow. This is incredible."

That was Zac Shing's first reaction to hearing our request for a full scale, 3D printed B.F.G. The UK Community Manager at MyMiniFactory, Shing is also a lifelong DOOM fan, so he knew what the B.F.G. means to the fans and what a mammoth task it would be to accurately create such a giant gun in the real world. MyMiniFactory would normally use a series of reference images to build a 3D print design, but because we wanted this B.F.G. to be as accurate as it could be, we shared the B.F.G. in-game files straight from the designers at id Software. "The file was so big it crashed our computers!" Shing laughed.

Kirby Downey, Lead Designer at MyMiniFactory, was tasked with working out how to break down the B.F.G. into smaller pieces that could be 3D printed and then stuck together. It took Downey around 35 hours to design each piece - 70 in total! - and then it took around 1000 hours of pure 3D printing, with models being continuously printed across multiple printers for about a month.

MyMiniFactory's Head of Post Processing, Sarah Wade, has worked on plenty of firearms. "I paint of lot guns," she says. "It's mostly what I do." But now Wade can lay claim to being one of very few people to have ever assembled a full-size B.F.G. The final piece is over three feet long, 18" in height, 18" in width and it weighs 36 pounds.