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Glossary

What the terms used in the app mean.

3MF: A 3D file format that holds several parts, their colors, and slicer settings. Bambu Studio and PrusaSlicer projects are 3MF files.
AMS: Bambu Lab's Automatic Material System, which holds 4 filaments and switches between them during a print.
Base: The solid slab under the model.
Bed: The flat surface the printer prints on. Its size limits how big one plate can be.
Elevation data: Public data giving the height of the ground, which the terrain is built from.
Embed: How far parts reach into the ground, so they overlap and join in the slicer.
Filament: The plastic a 3D printer melts. Each color in the model is one filament.
Generate: Download the map data and build the model, all in the browser.
Land cover: What covers the ground between roads and buildings: parks, forest, sand, rock, paving, and snow and ice.
LiDAR: A laser survey flown over an area, recording the height of everything it hits as millions of points.
LiDAR only: A model built entirely from a LiDAR survey, as one piece.
Map data: Roads, buildings, water, and land cover from OpenStreetMap and the Overture Maps Foundation.
Part: One piece of the model in one color, like the roads or the water. Slicers give each part a filament.
Plate: One print on the bed. A model too large for the bed is split into sections, one per plate.
Prime tower: A small block printed beside a multicolor model, where the printer cleans the nozzle after each color change. Also called a wipe tower.
Purging volumes: How much filament the printer flushes out when it changes color. Also called flushing volumes.
Returns: The points a LiDAR survey recorded. More returns per square meter means finer detail.
Scale: Printed millimeters per meter on the ground. 0.07 mm per meter is the same as 1:14,286.
Section: One piece of a model that's split to print on several plates.
Slicer: The program that turns a model into instructions for the printer, like Bambu Studio, OrcaSlicer, or PrusaSlicer.
STL: A simple 3D file format with no colors. One STL per color keeps the parts lined up.
Survey: One LiDAR data set, flown over an area in a given year.
Terrain: The ground of the model, shaped from elevation data.
Theme: A set of colors that fits itself to the number of filaments available.
Triangles: The flat faces a 3D model is made of. More triangles means more detail, bigger files, and slower slicing.
Whole tiles: LiDAR that only comes as large files, which are only downloaded once approved.