Proportions and scale in cosplay

I've decided to share a small guide on how to make your cosplay look harmonious and beautiful.

I often get asked, "Can you craft it?" but when it comes to the question of "What are the dimensions?" people often struggle or provide very disproportionate measurements.

The first thing you need to do is find a good reference image. Ideally, we need two types: a front view and a side view.

Let's take the character Nobara Kugisaki from Jujutsu Kaisen as an example. She has a hammer. We'll calculate its dimensions based on the desired height.

Alright, it seems like we've found one, but in this image, we can only see the details of the hammer, and determining its dimensions will be quite problematic. Let's continue searching. But make sure to save this image!

Here's what we need: the lady is standing at full height, arms approximately at the seams, and the hammer is almost in profile, slightly turned – but that's not critical.

Next, we'll input the image into any CAD or other software where we can measure and draw a segment. From the wiki, we learn that Nobara Kugisaki's height is 160 cm. We adjust the image to a height of 160 cm. Since I use mechanical CAD software, my measurements are in millimeters. The important thing is not to deceive ourselves because Nobara Kugisaki is standing with her legs apart, and if you remember your geometry lessons, looking at her, you understand that her leg is the hypotenuse. If you ignore this and immediately measure a segment from head to toe as 1600 mm (160 cm) instead of 1583 mm (158.3 cm), in reality, the height would be 1620 mm (162 cm).

Done. Let's move on to the hammer itself.

Here it's simple: either recall technical drawing, or simply rely on CAD software and draw the segments correctly. As we can see, the dimensions are 255 mm by 127 mm. We can easily model the rest of the hammer based on these measurements.

This model you can download from my page on Cults3D.

What to do if you downloaded the model from the internet? It's simple: proportions. Take a mathematics textbook, or do an online search for "proportion calculator." Let's go through an example.

Let's make the task a bit more complex. You downloaded a model, imported it into a slicer, and see the following: the model is divided into parts for printing.

Let's assume your height is 170 cm.

We calculated that with Nobara Kugisaki's height of 160 cm (1600 mm), the length of the hammer's head is 12.7 cm (127 mm). Let's set up a proportion: 127 : 1600 = Z : 1700, where Z represents the length of the hammer for our height.

Therefore, Z = 1700 * 127 : 1600 = 134.94. Let's round it and get Z = 135.

Enter the value 135 in the size field (highlighted in green), and the program will automatically calculate the scale. Enter this scale, 106.74% (highlighted in red), for all the details.

Done.

After printing, you'll have a hammer that fits your height.

I hope this article helps you take your cosplay to a new level!