DOOM – Building the B.F.G.

Executive Producer Marty Stratton put it very simply when he revealed DOOM to the world at BE3 2015: “DOOM’s about badass demons, big f’ing guns and moving really, really fast.” Seeing as we had 3D printed the Cyberdemon for 10 lucky DOOM winners during the DOOM open beta, and we weren’t really sure how to 3D print “moving really, really fast,” we turned our attention to big f’ing guns instead.

We figured that if you’re going to 3D print the B.F.G., you’d have to do it on a 1:1 scale to make it as real as possible. Otherwise, what’s the point? No one wants a LITTLE.F.G. Which led us to our next idea: Let’s give it away to one lucky fan! After running a competition where fans could create their own custom B.F.G. paint job, and we would award the B.F.G. to the creator of the most popular design. With this concept in mind, we then turned to our friends at MyMiniFactory to see whether they could 3D print the B.F.G. for us.

BIG Results

“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.

Age Required

And the Winner Is…

To say we were blown away by both the quantity and quality of the entries would be an understatement. The competition was close, but John Allen’s design blasted its way to the top and claimed the winning spot.

Age Required

While we’ve also learned a lot about 3D printing, and we continue to be impressed by the creativity of the DOOM community, one thing stayed constant throughout the project: Everyone loves a Big F’ing Gun.

If you’re interested in 3D printing, please check out MyMiniFactory’s website.

For more DOOM, check out these Bethesda.net features:

How One Artist Crafted a DOOM Demon with a Chainsaw
The Art of DOOM – Weapons
DOOM at E3 2016 – Demo, Free Updates and Premium DLC