The largest three-dimensional model of the city, printed on a 3D printer

I love cities, 3D models, layouts ... A city printed on a 3D printer? Perfect! In 2014, the largest printed interactive 3D model of the city was presented in San Francisco, and a year and a half later this status was still with it. The layout still does not cover the whole city, but 115 blocks of northeast San Francisco with a print resolution of 16 microns and an appropriate level of detail is a truly impressive result. It is strange that no one wrote about it here. I will correct the injustice.



The model was developed by the creative agency Steelblue, which is engaged in the marketing of large construction projects, under the auspices of Autodesk, commissioned by a large developer Tishman Speyer. It was made in the auto-descent "creative workshops of Pier 9" from VeroWhite photopolymer on two Objet500 Connex 3D printers with a 500x400x200 mm print camera. This printer combines a three-dimensional camera and high print speed with very thin layers, providing the ability to quickly and accurately create large parts or even several parts from various materials. But even on such equipment, printing took 2 months, 5 days a week, 18 hours a day. The total weight of 68 kg is no joke. But there is still a post-processing stage manually, about 45 minutes per quarter.



The three-dimensional model was created on the basis of a large number of heterogeneous data. Topographic maps, three-dimensional scanning, photographs, and architectural projects from the archive were also used. Many local sights, which were recreated with great care, fell into the covered area. The simulation took about 6 years: from 2008 to 2014. Even with the developer’s three-dimensional building models, the previous projects could not be used: it turned out to be easier to build new ones at a scale of 1: 1250 and printer resolution than to simplify old ones. The minimum detail size is approximately 30 cm in the real world.

Creation process video


The purpose of creating this large-scale facility is to help the developer in urban planning. Any block can be replaced and see what happens. One of the advantages of 3D printing, the authors call the ability to easily maintain the relevance of the model without much difficulty. Another plus is higher detail, production speed and lower cost than a traditional handmade model. The main point of creating a layout in general is that it allows you to feel the space in the same way that an arbitrarily realistic picture on the screen does not help. Although the virtual part of the model also plays an important role: the work goes on in it, and the layout itself serves for presentations.



In addition to the actual model of the city (in the state for 2017, when some large objects will be completed), a projector located under the ceiling is included in the kit, which creates an interactive component for every taste. You can impose future metro lines or roads on the layout (even simulate the flow of vehicles on them), you can sign the streets or display zoning on some basis. You can simulate the movement of the sun in the sky and trace the shadow areas. Only imagination limits the way in which backlighting is used.

Projector Demonstration


The original with all associated hardware and software remains with the customer, “Tishman Speyer”. In the copy, which will be shown to the public in the Autodesk gallery, the backlight is planned to be built into the table itself from below, for beauty. At Steelblue, they are ready to expand the model with new quarters, are developing a more functional version of the backlight with several projectors, and also would like to print other cities, but with such a laborious work and cost of several hundred thousand dollars, the San Francisco layout is still unique in terms of coverage .

Sources:
Presentation of the layout on the “Autodesk” website ; print report in the workshop “Pier 9” in the same place .
The story of Jeff Mottle, the owner of the architectural magazine “CGarchitect”, about the work of Steelblue on this object and future plans.
Own site of the main modeler of this project, Jacob Gubler , you can also see similar but smaller prints of Boston and Manhattan, as well as a print San Francisco made from transparent Veroclear.