Step 1 — Capture a Scan Worth Printing
House Mode reads .glb, .gltf, .obj, .ply, and .stl — which covers the export options of every mainstream scanning app and photogrammetry pipeline. Before you get to the tool, the capture itself decides most of your quality:
- Walk a full circle at a steady distance, then a second circle from higher up. Missing angles become holes, and holes become guesswork.
- Shoot on an overcast day or in open shade. Hard shadows get baked into the geometry as fake bumps.
- Keep 60–70% overlap between frames. More frames is nearly always better than more resolution.
- Include the roof if you possibly can — a drone or an upstairs window in a neighbouring building is worth the effort, because roofs read as the most recognisable part of a miniature.
Don't worry about the surrounding garden, cars, or fence at this stage. Cropping is the part the tool is good at.
Step 2 — Crop Away the Neighbourhood
The Crop cleanup panel gives you six independent sliders — Left, Right, Front, Back, Bottom, and Top — each trimming up to 45% off that face of the model. They work in percentages rather than millimetres, so they behave the same whether your scan came in at real-world scale or at some arbitrary unit the app invented.
Bottom — your most useful slider
Almost every scan includes a bowl of lawn and driveway. Raise Bottom until the ground plane disappears and you are cutting into the base of the walls by a millimetre or two. That flat cut becomes a perfect bed contact surface.
Left / Right / Front / Back
Trim fences, wheelie bins, hedges, and the half-reconstructed house next door. Watch the Width and Depth readouts in the HUD as you drag — they shrink live, which tells you when you have stopped cutting scenery and started cutting building.
Top
Mostly for scans with floating debris — drifting point-cloud noise above the roofline, or a tree branch reconstructed into a hovering blob. Nudge it just enough to lose the artefacts.
Crop is Non-Destructive
Nothing is committed until you press Make printable, and ↻ Reset crop puts all six sliders back to zero. Overshoot deliberately once on each axis so you can see where the building actually starts — then dial back.
Step 3 — Pick the Right Print Style
Four styles, and the choice changes your filament bill more than any slicer setting will:
House + base plinth
The default, and the right answer for display models. Adds a solid slab under the building so the miniature has a clean edge, a name-plate surface, and something to grip the bed.
Solid miniature
Building only, watertight, no plinth. Best when it will be glued into a larger diorama or a terrain board you have already printed.
Facade / block model
Keeps one elevation and extrudes it back by the Facade depth you set (2–40 mm). Ideal for wall-mounted pieces and architectural presentation boards — and it prints in a fraction of the time.
Hollow display shell
Thin-walled. The cheapest option in material, and the one to choose if you plan to light the model from inside with an LED.
Base height (0–20 mm) and Base padding (0–30 mm) control the plinth. Padding is the margin of slab that extends past the walls; 6–10 mm looks deliberate, while 2 mm looks like a mistake. If you want to engrave an address on the front edge later, give yourself at least 8 mm of height to work with.
Step 4 — Scale It, Then Check the Bed
Scans arrive at meaningless scale, so Target max size (50–260 mm) is how you set the real dimension: the tool scales the model so its longest axis matches that number. A few reference points that work well in practice:
- 60–90 mm — desk ornament or keepsake. Fine detail vanishes, silhouette survives.
- 120–150 mm — the sweet spot. Windows and roof texture stay readable, and it fits any bed in one piece.
- 200 mm and up — presentation model. Expect to split it.
Pick your machine from the Printer list — Bambu A1 Mini, Bambu A1/P1/X1, Creality K1, or Custom — and the fit indicator turns green when the scaled model clears the build volume. Watch Bed parts in the HUD too: anything above 1 means the model needs splitting, which is exactly what the next step is for.
Detail Has a Floor
A 0.4 mm nozzle cannot resolve a feature thinner than about 0.5 mm. At 80 mm tall, a real 100 mm window reveal is roughly 0.1 mm on the model — it will simply not print. If specific architectural details matter to you, scale up rather than fighting the slicer.
Step 5 — Make Printable and Export
Press 🛠 Make printable. The tool applies your crops, rebuilds the geometry in the chosen style, adds the plinth, sits the result flat on Z = 0, and scales to your target. The HUD updates with final Width, Depth, Height, and triangle count. Then:
- ⬇ Export STL — your printable file.
- 📷 Snapshot — a render of the viewport. Genuinely useful for a listing photo, a client email, or a before/after next to a photo of the real building.
- 👁 Toggle grid — hides the bed grid for a cleaner snapshot.
- 🗑 Clear — start over with a different scan.
Where House Mode Sits in the Workflow
House Mode hands off cleanly to the rest of the toolchain:
- Scans are notorious for non-manifold edges. Run the exported STL through the STL Doctor before slicing — it takes seconds and catches the holes your slicer would silently guess at.
- Going bigger than one bed? Slicer Pro splits it with alignment keys, and DowelPro generates the pegs for the joins.
- Hollow shells save more filament again through Hollowing & Drainage.
- Printing a whole street? Build Plate Packer fits the houses onto as few plates as possible.
- Want the terrain the house sits on as well? The Topographic Generator turns a heightmap of the site into a matching relief tile.
- Costing a batch for a client — estate agent models, wedding gifts, model railway buildings? Mega Estimator gives you grams and hours per unit.