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People often long for their home. They watch films about the city and call family to get there. Nick Hollister is a San Francisco native who 3D printed an enormous topographically correct map to connect with his roots.
“Printing each tile, I got to know each neighborhood a little,” Hollister said.
Hollister was raised in the Western Addition along with his siblings. He then moved to Providence, Rhode Island in June, where he designs toys for Hasbro.
He proudly displays the frame mode from his hometown on his wall as a graduate of product design at Purdue University.
The print looks almost like a plaster casting, but it’s actually created from four strips of plastic filament measuring 2.5km in length.
It took approximately 720 hours for the complete scale model of San Francisco to be printed.
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. They are then assembled into a “jigsaw” puzzle and placed in the birds-eye-view, 14×10-foot San Francisco.
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 explained that one benefit of this data is its accuracy. 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.
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.”
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 by 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.
“They hold personal value,” Hollister said.
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