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satprint

Satellite terrain to 3D-printable models.

Eric G. Suchanek, PhD -- Flux-Frontiers

Pick a place on a map and satprint turns its real elevation data into a solid relief model scaled to your printer: the terrain on top, four walls and a flat base. You get three files from the same model:

  • a watertight STL of the terrain and its buildings, for a one-color print;
  • a multi-color 3MF that splits the model into land, water, buildings and a border frame on four filaments, for a multi-material printer;
  • a GLB with satellite imagery draped over the terrain and the roofs, for viewing in Blender, macOS Quick Look or a web viewer.

The satprint web app

The page follows your system's light or dark setting, and the button in the header switches it:

The satprint web app, light theme

Mount Fuji from real elevation tiles, 120 mm wide with a 5 mm frame, 1.5x exaggeration:

Mount Fuji preview

Landmarks that building outlines cannot describe are built as meshes: the Gateway Arch, the Eiffel Tower, the Space Needle and Christ the Redeemer.

Landmarks as meshes

Bridges over water get a deck on piers, here the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges and the Golden Gate Bridge:

Bridges over water

Roads are raised strips that follow the ground, here around Twin Peaks in San Francisco, printed in their own color from the 3MF:

Roads in San Francisco

What it does

  • Real elevation, no API key. Elevation comes from the public AWS Terrain Tiles set (SRTM, ASTER, GMTED and others). You can also upload a heightmap or use a procedural demo terrain that needs no network.
  • Print-aware output. True plan scale, vertical exaggeration or a fixed relief height, base thickness, sea-level flattening, smoothing and grids up to 1024 columns. Each build reports the model size, scale, triangle count, volume and an estimated PLA weight.
  • Watertight by construction. Every edge is shared by exactly two outward-wound triangles, so slicers load the STL without repair.
  • Buildings from OpenStreetMap, as closed solids standing on the terrain. Towers keep their setbacks, and overlapping footprints are merged so no two solids pass through each other.
  • Bridges over water from OpenStreetMap, as a raised deck on piers.
  • Roads from OpenStreetMap, as raised strips that follow the terrain.
  • Four filaments. Land, water, buildings, roads and a border frame are separate parts of one 3MF object, already on filaments 1 to 4 in Bambu Studio and centered on the plate. The border shares the land filament.
  • Search and presets. Search any place by name, or pick one of 70 presets: 40 cities and landmarks and 30 mountains and landscapes.

Where to go next