Your neighbourhood as a 3D model, a poster or a 3D print

Three steps

1. Search a place. An address, a street, a village, a postcode or raw coordinates such as 48.7765, 9.1772. Or tap “use my location”.
2. Look around. Drag to turn and tilt, pinch or scroll to zoom, two fingers (or Shift-drag) to slide. Tap a building to put the pin on it, “this one is ours”.
3. Keep it. Share a link that opens the same view with the same house pinned, download a poster image, or download an STL file to 3D print.

What’s in the model

• Terrain from open elevation data. Hills can be exaggerated from 1× to 5× and drawn with contour lines.
• Buildings at the height recorded in OpenStreetMap, or its number of floors × 3 m. Where neither is mapped, the height is estimated from the neighbourhood, and the app says what share of buildings that is.
• Roads, water and green areas painted on the ground, each of which you can switch off.
• Sea drawn from OpenStreetMap’s coastline, so harbours and bays sit at sea level.

3D printing your place

Open the share menu, pick a print size and download the STL. The file is a single solid in millimetres: the terrain as a block on a 3 mm base, with every building standing on it. It is checked to be watertight, so slicers such as PrusaSlicer, Bambu Studio, OrcaSlicer and Cura shouldn’t need to repair it. North is at the back of the print.

Tips

• Choose a small area for a big print. Houses are tiny at true scale; 1 or 2 km on 15–20 cm shows streets and houses best.
• Exaggerate the terrain before you export: the print uses the same setting as the screen. 2–3× makes gentle hills readable.
• No supports needed. The model sits flat on its base. A 0.4 mm nozzle and 0.12–0.16 mm layers keep small buildings crisp.
• Large areas make large files. A 2 km city centre is about 10–15 MB, a 4 km one up to about 40 MB.
• If a building’s outline in the map data is broken beyond repair, it is left out and the app tells you how many.

Privacy

• No account, no cookies, no analytics. Your Place has no server of its own: the app runs in your browser.
• What you type in the search box goes from your browser to the address search services Photon (by komoot) and, if needed, Nominatim (OpenStreetMap), which return its coordinates.
• Share links hold only coordinates and the view, never the address you typed. A shared model is named after its neighbourhood, not a street address.
• Map data you have loaded is cached on your device so it opens faster next time.

Questions

My house is missing, or flat

Buildings come from OpenStreetMap, which volunteers map by hand. Cities are well covered; some villages have few buildings, and many have no height recorded. You can add your house, or its number of floors, yourself on openstreetmap.org, and it shows up here once the map tiles update.

Which devices work?

Any current browser with WebGL 2: Safari, Chrome, Firefox or Edge, on a phone, tablet or computer. You can also install it as an app from the browser menu.

Can I share what I make?

Yes. The map data is © OpenStreetMap contributors under the Open Database Licence, so credit “© OpenStreetMap contributors” wherever you show a model, poster or print. Posters carry the credit already.

Data sources and credits

• Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL
• Vector map tiles: OpenFreeMap, schema © OpenMapTiles
• Terrain: Mapzen terrain tiles on AWS Open Data
• Address search: Photon by komoot, Nominatim
• Fallback map data: Overpass API

Your Place is open source under the MIT licence: github.com/yourplace3d/3d-city. Ideas and bug reports are welcome there.