Some people watch movies or make calls to family when they long for the home of their dreams. Nick Hollister from San Francisco, however, has 3D printed a huge topographically precise map in order to get closer to his roots.
“Printing each tile, I got to know each neighborhood a little,” Hollister said.
Hollister, who grew up with three of his brothers in the Western Addition, moved in June to Providence in Rhode Island where he is now a designer for Hasbro toys.
Purdue University Product Design graduate proudly displays his framed model of his home city on his Wall.
Although it looks like a plaster cast of the model, it is actually made from four white plastic filaments that span 2.5 km in length.
Printing the scale-model San Francisco from 36 8-inch-long plastic tiles took around 720 hours.
The filament is “extruded”—think of a hot glue gun—by an Ender-3 Pro 3D printer layer-by-layer, 0.2 millimeters at a time into 8-inch tiles. Finally, the tiles can be assembled like a puzzle to create a birds-eye view of San Francisco that measures 14 by 10.
Details of San Francisco native Nick Hollister’s 3D-printed maps of San Francisco | Courtesy Nick Hollister
To create his 3D model, Hollister uses topographical data produced by LiDAR scans taken from December 2017 through April 2018 by the U.S. Geological Survey—available on OpenTopography, a public database of topographical scans.
The data is then ingested by 3D modeling software Blender to create files the printer can read, and then it’s just a matter of letting the roughly $200 printer do its job.
Hollister stated that accuracy is one of the many benefits to using these data. Because the maps are created using aerial topographical scans of San Francisco, Hollister feels it’s a more authentic form of re-creating San Francisco than painting or sketching a map would be.
Nick Hollister, a toy designer, 3D printed a scale model of San Francisco using 2.5 kms of plastic filament. | Courtesy Nick Hollister
Hollister claims that he can print people and cars exactly the way they are at any moment if he zooms in enough.
“It’s interesting to hold the tile because it’s like a freeze frame of that moment in 2018,” Hollister said. “This is a more accurate portrayal of the city.”
Hollister stated that he missed San Francisco because of the many parks in the area where he grew-up, as well as the entrepreneurial energy that he feels San Franciscans radiate.
“The feeling of the city, it’s young. It’s something you don’t get in rural areas like where I went to school,” Hollister said. “Everybody’s doing something.”
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Details of San Francisco native Nick Hollister’s 3D-printed maps of San Francisco | Courtesy Nick Hollister
Hollister has also 3D-printed a model of the Foggy Bottom neighborhood in Washington, D.C., the campus of his alma mater, Purdue University, and, earlier this year, a separate 3D map of some of San Francisco’s northern neighborhoods, including the Presidio, the Marina District and North Beach.
Hollister once sold digital 3D printer files for as low as $20-30, but he quit after getting overwhelmed with 3D printing problems from his customers.
He said he would likely sell other 3D-printed maps if time allows, but cautioned they are time-consuming and would be more expensive as a result, so it could be months before he is ready to set up shop—if he ever decides to do that.
“I haven’t arrived at an actual price,” Hollister said of making new model maps for customers.
Hollister claimed that the two current SF models maps he has created are irreplaceable and therefore not up for sale.
