Fallout Automatic Laser Rifle

Build log of my Automatic Laser Rifle

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Fallout Automatic Laser Rifle

Decals & Stencils

One of the things I thought would really elevate this build would be to include game accurate decals on the laser. I had a pretty hard time finding resources on these, so I ended up making my own based on texture rips from the Fallout 4 HD pack.

Tools Used

Software

This could be its own blog post, so I’ll keep the nerd shit short.

I started with the Bethesda Archive Extractor to dump out the DDS files, which look like this: Triple Barrel Laser Texture

From there a series of python and machine learning libraries were used to isolate, clean up, and export the decals, running locally in my lab environment:

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game textures (.dds/.png)  ──┐
STL stencils                 ├─► measure (NumPy/SciPy/trimesh)
A4 reference PDF (Poppler)  ──┘         │
                                        ▼
                     rebuild as geometry (Shapely + fontTools)
                                        │
                        ┌───────────────┼────────────────┐
                        ▼               ▼                ▼
                 curves-only SVG   600 DPI PNG     weathered PNG
                 (mm canvases)     (cairosvg)      (noise pipeline)

The end results were fairly accurate to the texture rips, with some SVG cleanup happening directly in Inkscape to close bodies and make them stencil cutter friendly.