The GTA Online map took 400 hours to 3D print

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I’ve been playing Grand Theft Auto V since it launched in 2013. So, I’m quite familiar with the map. But seeing everything perfectly recreated using 3D printing is wild and makes me appreciate how much detail and work Rockstar has packed into this digital world. Not to mention how impressive this 3D map is in both accuracy and scale.

The awesome 3D map of GTA V that goes viral on Twitter was created by Dom Riccobene. He is a product designer who often uses real world data to recreate real places as exact data sculptures. But due to covid-19 screwing everything up, Riccobene was unable to go out and do his job. So, needing something to do to occupy his time, he sought inspiration in the virtual worlds of GTA V and Red Dead Redemption II.

His plan was to create high-resolution datasets of both RDR2 and GTA V. He would then use that data to create huge, perfectly scaled 3D physical maps of the game worlds. He described the process as an immense technical challenge.

To get started, I used a custom script to first scan the terrain and buildings in RDR2, Riccobene explained in an email. So I managed to bring it for use in GTA V. It works in the game and collects terrain elevations in a 500-1000m radius around the player when a hotkey is pressed adding up to 1,000,000 data points per scan.

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Since the games don’t spawn across the entire map at the same time, Riccobene had to scan the map by hand slowly using this process. He estimates it took him about 100 hours for each game before he had enough data for his data sculptures.

The next challenge was to merge the point clouds and transform the dataset into real-world data so that it could be manipulated, processed and analyzed with professional mapping and cartography software, Riccobene said.

To do this, he mapped all the 500 million coordinates he had scanned and collected in real coordinates on Earth. This allowed him to create an elevation grid. With that, he could use his software and tools to start printing the map. But that too was complicated, as one might expect. Some cards would only take an hour to print, although more complex areas with many buildings and height variations could take up to 12 hours to print.

I used a proprietary workflow to transform the tiled dataset into polygons as 3D printable meshes, explained Riccobene. Each tile is an 800 mb 3D model. From there it was a matter of trial and error to dial in my 3D print settings to print buildings, terrain and water features in black, all at once. They also needed to fit perfectly as a whole.

In all, it took around 125 hours to print the GTA V 3D map seen in his viral tweet. You can see more about the behind-the-scenes process on her Instagram. He estimates that the entire project, including printing, data acquisition, elevation map creation and fine-tuning, took more than 400 hours over a year.

While this was obviously a lot of work and time, Riccobene is thrilled with the results and had a lot of fun doing it all.

It was probably the most fun and technically demanding project I’ve ever worked on.

With that done, his next plan is to perform the same process for the RDR2 map. He has already spent over 200 hours working on it and hopes to create an equally impressive map using that Rockstar game in the near future.

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