Questions and answers

You pick a piece of the Earth on the map, and it builds a 3D model of that ground: hills and valleys from real elevation data, plus buildings, roads, water, trees and your own files if you want them. You can then download the model for 3D printing, for Blender or Unity, or for CAD.

No account, no sign-in, no payment. Everything runs in your browser. Nothing you make is stored on a server.

Search a place or paste coordinates like 34.16, 77.58, then move and zoom the map under the frame. Pick a shape in the left rail: square, round, hexagon, or Free. With Free you drag the corner and edge handles, or press Draw and drag a new rectangle.

Yes, four ways: hold Shift (or Ctrl) and drag anywhere on the map, drag the round knob above the frame, use the turn pad in the left rail, or press [ and ]. Holding Ctrl while dragging snaps to 5°. You can also turn the model later in the editor under Look, and nothing needs downloading again.

GeoJSON, GPX and KML. Lines become raised routes on the ground. Polygons become raised outlines, which suits plots, zones and boundaries; switch one to a solid block under Layers if you want it filled. Points become pins. Press Import on the map, use Add file in the Layers tab, or drop files anywhere on the page. Importing from the map draws the file on the map and sets the frame around it, so nothing is built until you press Make it 3D.

Layers, then Imported files: line width and how far routes stand above ground, whether shapes are an outline or a solid block, their width and height, and the height of pins. Each is a separate colored part in the exported 3MF.

No. Files are read inside your browser and never leave your device. Share links do not include them either.

Elevation comes from AWS Terrain Tiles, with Mapterhorn as a backup. Resolution depends on the place and zoom: roughly 10 to 30 metres per sample in most of the world, coarser over oceans and some remote regions. It is good for terrain shape, not for survey work.

"Choose a good height for me" is on by default and lifts flat areas so they read well at print size. Turn it off under Look, Height, and set your own factor. 1× is true to life.

Either the area is larger than the limit for that layer (500 km² for buildings, roads, railways and streams, 300 km² for trees); or nobody has mapped them in OpenStreetMap yet; or the OpenStreetMap servers were busy. Over about 40 km² the data is fetched a piece at a time and the Layers tab counts the pieces off as they arrive. If some pieces do not answer in time you are told how many, and pressing Make it 3D again usually picks up the rest. Very dense cities draw at most 40,000 buildings.

Ground cover comes from the same data: woods, grass, farmland, wetland, sand, rock and built-up ground are laid on the terrain as thin slabs, each its own colour and its own part in a 3MF, so a flat area still has something to look at. Set how far they stand proud under Layers, Ground cover. Trees fill forests, woods and parks mapped in OpenStreetMap, plus individually mapped trees. Choose the shape (canopy blobs, pines, or trunk and top), how many per cm², and their height. Canopy blobs print without supports.

It fills the model with water up to a height you choose, so you can see what would flood. It exports as its own part. Separately, under Look, Water, you can choose whether rivers and lakes are cut into the ground or laid on the surface. Cut in is the default and reads far better, both on screen and printed: a river becomes a channel rather than a raised ribbon. The depth is limited by the ground thickness so there is always a floor beneath it.

File	Use it for
3MF	Multicolor printing. Each layer is a separate part, so you assign a filament per part.
STL	One solid, one color.
STLs (zip)	One STL per color, for slicers that do not read 3MF parts.
GLB / OBJ	Textured model for Blender, Unity, Unreal or web viewers.
DXF	3D faces on named layers for CAD.

Open Print, pick your printer, and the page tells you whether it fits. Either reduce the size, or split the model into tiles. The size slider stops at 600 mm, but you can type a larger number in the box beside it for a wall-sized map. Then either set the columns and rows yourself, or turn on "Split by tile size" and give the largest piece your printer can manage — "Use my printer bed" fills that in for you — and the grid is worked out from it. Tiles line up edge to edge, and the readout in the corner of the preview shows the whole size and the size of each piece.

Terrain, base, frame, raised text, roads, water, imported shapes and canopy trees print flat on the bed without supports. Steep cliffs, pins and "trunk and top" trees may need them. Keep "Thicken tiny roads and buildings so they print" on.

Yes. Every part is a closed solid with outward-facing triangles, checked automatically. If your slicer reports errors, tell me which part.

Open Base, turn on the frame, then type in "Writing on the frame". The place name and coordinates fill in automatically. Letters are raised on the front edge and curve around round maps. Latin letters, numbers and ° only.

A connection check runs when the page opens, names what is blocked and switches to backup servers where it can. Office, college and defence networks, VPNs, ad blockers and antivirus web filters are the usual causes. Test on a phone hotspot to confirm.

Current Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari on desktop, Android and iOS. WebGL must be available. Flyover video recording needs Chrome, Edge or Firefox.

Read the terms first. OpenStreetMap data is ODbL and needs credit, and Esri imagery is not licensed for commercial use without an ArcGIS account.