Help / Build a model

Model settings

Choose what the model is built from, tidy its road network, add satellite land cover, and set its base and border.

Map data or LiDAR only

Build from, at the top of Model, decides what kind of model is built.

Map data: The default. Terrain, water, parks, roads, buildings, and trees come from map data, and each is a separate part that can print in its own color. Pick what goes in under Layers.
LiDAR only: Everything a laser survey of the area recorded, including ground, buildings, trees, and bridges, as one solid piece in one color. Water can still be a part of its own. It only works where a public survey covers the area. See LiDAR.

Base and border

Base thickness: The solid base under the lowest point of the ground, including the floor under water. The default is 1 mm. A thicker base makes a stiffer print.
Border rim: A raised frame around the edge of the model, off by default. Tick it, then open it to set its Height above the highest ground and its Width.

Road network

Only for map data models. Tidy road network (on) cleans up the mapped road lines before they print. Each step can be turned off on its own.

Merge divided roads: The two carriageways of a divided road print as one road down the middle, where they are closer than Minimum gap.
Remove doubled lines: Leaves out paths, tracks, and service roads running right beside a more important road, like sidewalks drawn beside streets.
Join loose ends: Joins a path that stops just short of a road, because the sidewalk it met was left out.
Remove stubs and specks: Leaves out short spurs that lead nowhere and small pieces touching nothing.
Fill hairline cracks: Off by default. Fills cracks too thin to print between roads side by side.

Land cover

Only for map data models. Satellite land cover (off) adds forest, shrub, grass, cropland, wetland, and permanent snow seen from satellite (ESA WorldCover) to the parks, fields, woods, and glaciers on the map. Cropland prints as Fields, under Farmland. Turn it on when parts of the model come out as bare terrain because nobody mapped what covers them, like wooded hills, open country and farmland around a town, or snow fields on a mountain. It needs Parks and land cover on under Layers.

In towns and cities the satellite counts tree-lined streets and gardens as forest, so whole neighborhoods can come out green. It works best for landscapes and the country around small towns.

Where parts meet

These two settings only show for map data models.

Structures in water: How roads, buildings, bridge piers, and routes standing in water are printed. Keep ground under them (the default) puts each one on a strip of ground. Cut through water to floor takes them to the bottom of it in their own color. Both still stand if the water part is deleted in the slicer. Rest on the water leaves the water whole and sets them on top of it, so fewer colors print in the water's layers, but they need the water part under them. With Water off it builds them down to the bottom instead, since there's no water to rest on, and with water on its own plates it keeps ground under them.
Embed into terrain: How far roads, buildings, land cover, and trees reach into the ground, so the parts overlap a little and the slicer joins them. The default of 0.04 mm rarely needs changing.

LiDAR only settings

With LiDAR only picked, Model also shows the settings for the survey. Layers has nothing to set for these models.

Survey: Which survey to read. Automatic picks one. See LiDAR for how it chooses.
Resolution: How finely the survey is read, as a number of grid cells spread over the area: Standard is 8 million, Fine 16 million, Finer 32 million, and Finest 64 million. It starts on the finest the device has the memory for. The line under the buttons says how large the cells come out on the ground and on the print. Custom takes any number of cells, or a cell size on the print or on the ground.
Trees: Natural keeps each crown where the survey saw it and as tall, with its top smoothed and its edge rounded off. Off puts the ground or roof underneath in their place.
Cars and clutter: Remove cars takes cars and vans down to the street. Remove all under 2 m flattens everything that low. Keep leaves it all as small bumps.
Printed as: How water prints: a Thin layer in the water color a little below its banks (the default), Cut away through the base, or Recessed into the model so the whole print is one color. Water depth, Water thickness, and Cut through the base above adjust each one.
Water outlines from map data: On by default. Uses mapped shorelines where they agree with the survey, and fills in water the survey missed.
Height scale, Terrain exaggeration: Make buildings, trees, and bridges, or the ground itself, taller or lower than life. 1 is true to scale.

More cells keep finer walls, roof edges, and ground, but download and process more, and need more memory: about 1 GB in the browser tab for every 10 million cells. Cells are never smaller than 0.1 m, and they grow where the survey is too sparse to fill them, so on many areas the finer buttons come out the same. Only the densest surveys fill cells under 0.25 m: the 2023 survey of San Francisco fills 0.18 m. How many cells a model can have depends on how much memory the browser reports: Standard at 4 GB or less, Fine at 8 GB, Finer at 16 GB, and Finest at 32 GB. Phones never report more than 8 GB. Safari and Firefox report nothing, which counts as 8 on a computer and 4 on a phone or tablet, since a browser tab on a phone gets much less memory than the phone has. The line under the buttons says when an area goes over the limit, and Allow larger grids goes past it on a device with more memory than it reports, up to 128 million cells under Custom.

Reset model settings at the bottom of the section puts these back to their defaults. It doesn't change Build from, and Border rim has a reset link of its own. Both only show after something has changed.