Step 1: Get a Heightmap
Free sources of real-world elevation data, in increasing order of effort:
- Tangrams Heightmapper — draw a bounding box on a real-world map, click "Export PNG". 16-bit grayscale, ready to drop in.
- OpenTopography — free SRTM and ALOS tiles. Download as GeoTIFF, convert to PNG in any image editor.
- NASA SRTM — raw 1-arc-second DEM tiles. Higher resolution but requires QGIS or GDAL to convert.
For a first print, start with Heightmapper — the workflow is "draw box, click button, drop file".
Step 2: Tile Size
- Side Length — 200–300 mm for a desk-sized landscape, 80–120 mm for a coaster-sized memento. Larger than your bed needs Slicer Pro to chop it up.
- Base Thickness — 4–8 mm. Sturdy without wasting filament. Solid base also lets you label, magnet, or screw-mount the tile afterwards.
- Resolution — 200–300 px maps roughly one vertex per 1 mm of side. Higher than that and the file balloons without visible detail gain on FDM.
Step 3: Vertical Exaggeration
Real mountains are flat compared to their footprint. Mount Everest is about 9 km tall over a 200 km base — a 1:1 scale print would look like a barely-bumpy pancake. You always need to exaggerate.
Crank Vertical Scale and the Exaggeration multiplier (0.3–3.0) until the relief is visible. Rules of thumb:
- Continental areas (whole countries, mountain ranges) — 2–3×.
- Regional areas (a national park, a single mountain) — 1.2–1.8×.
- City blocks or canyons — 0.4–0.8×; less is more when the relief is already strong.
Step 4: Sea Level Cut
If the heightmap covers an island or coastline, push Sea Level Cut up to clip everything below a percentage of the lowest pixel. The result is a clean, flat ocean surface and the coastline pops as a sharp boundary.
Without a sea-level cut, ocean floors (which are themselves uneven) print as faint noise that distracts from the headline geography.
Step 5: Smooth the Stair-Stepping
8-bit heightmaps have only 256 elevation values, which prints as visible terraces — rice-paddy lines across what should be smooth slopes. Toggle Smooth to apply a 3×3 blur that softens the steps without losing the major peaks and ridges.
16-bit heightmaps (Heightmapper, properly-converted SRTM) have 65,536 elevations and rarely need smoothing — the terraces are below your printer's Z resolution.
Print and Paint
The exported STL carries vertex colours (water → grass → rock → snow) for software that supports them, but most slicers strip colour. Print in white PLA at 0.16 mm layers, then dry-brush acrylic paint over the peaks — blue at the bottom, green mid-slope, brown on rocks, white on summits.
Pairs Well With…
- Slicer Pro — for landscape tiles bigger than your bed, segment with alignment keys and tile a wall map.
- Nameplate Generator — print a small location label and glue it to the corner of the tile.
- Mega Estimator — large terrain tiles eat filament; estimate cost before you commit.