How do I properly align gun front and rear iron sights and also know their dimensions?

Technical Support Modeling
,
1

This is my first time trying to model something in Blender and at the moment I’m creating an AK-47 for a Unity project, it’s unfinished but I’ve come to the last part of fixing which is the rear sight area. I’ve matched the front part of the sight and also the rear to the same height, centred both on the gun’s axis, and spaced them at the real 378mm sight radius and I also have the proper gun length.

My problem is the small sight dimensions. I can’t find information on how wide/deep the rear sight notch should be, or the exact size of the front sight post. How do modellers determine these? One tutorial I followed gave no dimensions.

I have the guns blueprint with both the side and top orthographic views but they slightly conflict with eachother and also don’t help with the dimensions of the two rear and front sight posts.

I’ve looked at several free assets on this particular gun but they are all different to one another.

image
image2556×1341 564 KB

2

Did you try researching actual blueprints?

https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2017/04/03/ak-47-akmakms-ak-74-blueprints/

3

Thanks for the reply. Yeah I did quite a bit of research, I’m using an official blueprint which is a two part blueprint poster set but it didn’t show individual parts. I’m taking a look now at the blog you sent, it’s just a bit hard to read, I’ll have to spend some time on it

4

Welcome :tada:..

in general when using some “general overview” blueprint and not some detailed construction plan the first one is for the general proper alignment and ratios and then one does use more references, references, references, references… and does look at them unitl one does see this in one dreams.. :thinking: ..well.. kind of.. :winking_face_with_tongue:

5

Thanks for the welcome and the insight too.

For reference, I have been using this blueprint, I’m not sure if it’s what I should be using after this post though:

5313×3402 197 KB

So I have been using the top image as my side reference, and the second image for my top reference. But with the top reference primarily, its very hard (for me) to know what I should be doing with the front and rear sights since a number of parts are cluttered together in one spot.

6

Yoi may cut these details and rearrange in some image processing app.. or “have a look” at multiple reference images…

7

I’d go on gun nut forums, there’s probably folks there who know every variation that ever existed and why you’re seeing this discrepancy

8

You say this is for unity, which I assume means a video game?

If some player out there decides to point out in a steam review that the rear site is 3 mm too wide, I think you have other issues to worry about.

As far as “where all these parts go”… there are millions of these guns, and millions of pictures of them on the Internet. Go look at them, this isn’t confidential rocket science.

9

Also:
There is a difference when using first or third person weapons in games. Not only the camera but also because what you see of them.. so in fact for some first person the models aren’t even showing the whole thing and maybe are also modeld “disturbed” (perspective shortening) which is not noticeable in the correct view". Even “the handling” or the animation for this may differ.

See for example: