Scale Calculator

I did some sculpting a few years ago. I never produced anything I was particularly happy with, but two or three of the figures I made were ones I would have bought had I seen them in a shop, so that's always a good sign (alternatively it's similar to someone laughing at their own jokes, which is kindof sad). Anyway, I stopped largely because I ran out of inspiration (that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it). Recently, however, inspiration has returned, and I'm doing some background work on what will hopefully become a fully fledged project.

The plan is to do a 54 mm vampire hunter type person. I plan to use a precast head and feet (and possibly hands), as those are the parts I have most trouble with. I've had a modern military type figure awaiting conversion for some years, but the amount of work I'd have to do on it has always put me off slightly. The main stumbling block, however, has been my inability to find a 54 mm scale modern crossbow for the figure. Scratch-building has never been one of my strong suits, so the project has languished...

For whatever reason I've decided that, as I want to sculpt the figure, I should at least try and scratch-build the weapon. To this end I've spent the last few weeks finding pictures and getting details of crossbows (not from work, could be dodgy explaining that in my surfing history :-) If all goes well, I plan to try a shotgun and chainsaw next, so definitely not suitable for work!).

After finding quite a variety of measurements - bolts ranging from 14 inches to 24 inches, and crossbows up to 36 inches long, I settled on a more modest bolt size, giving an overall real life crossbow length of 28 inches. However, I now had to convert and tweak the real world measurements to 54 mm (1:32) scale. I did some of these by hand on the calculator - convert inches to mm, then scale, but reckoned this would be better done by computer.

A little while later, I had constructed a simple online program, published via googleapps. I wanted something that I could keep beside me, so it had to be accessible from my iPhone, rather than having to drag a laptop out. Some Googling later and I found the magic html tags to size my app correctly for mobile devices. It is still usable from a full size browser, just looks quite boring...

Scale Size Calculator

To use it, you just put in the actual size, select the units and new scale, then press calculate. It will also convert between scales, so you can enter, e.g. 2 mm in 1:65, select output scale of 1:32 and it'll tell you how big the part is in 1:32 (4.063 mm if you're interested). This should allow measurements to be scaled up (or down) fairly easily.

I posted this in the Lead Adventure Forum and someone suggested it would be handy to know what real life size a figure is, given its scale size, e.g. if a figure is 28 mm tall and would be 6 feet (72 inches) in real life, what scale is the figure (1:65).

I added this to the program, as shown below. Note also that I've added some help text since I took the screenshots, just in case anyone has trouble understanding the form.

Figure Scale Calculator

If you want to try them, these programs can be accessed at Scale Size Calculator and Figure Scale Calculator respectively.

Being really impatient, the thought of having to wait for the results over wifi prompted me to create an offline version. I have a Dell Axim lying about (bought it a while back, and have never really found a use for it. It just lies in the cupboard and I dig it out and recharge the battery every six months), so I have created a Windows Mobile 5 version of the software (apologies for the screenshots, they're resized clippings from the device emulator with the development SDK). I don't have a way to link to the program for upload, so not really sure why I mentioned this :-)

Scale Size Calculator

Figure Scale Calculator

I used the online version when sizing the crossbow, and I plan to use it for the other models. Normally, after I write a program, I never use it again, so hopefully this will make a nice change :-)

The actual adventures in scratch-building will be the subject of a future post, assuming I produce something usable...