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I always love these miniatures when I see them in museums, airports, city halls, etc.

Maybe I missed it, I didn't see where the data came from. I am wondering if someone did scans of the city with something that generates point cloud data. Or maybe extrapolated from a 2d satellite and then later fixed by humans?

I love the overhead projector adding another level of information to this.

I wonder how hard it would be to make one of these of my town.

Surely there's publicly available lidar data that I could import into some software to slice it into squares small enough for me to 3D-print? Although I guess I'd have to make sure I'm not just printing noise where trees are...

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In my opinion, this is the kind of thing that is better done with AR.
A while ago I wrote a program to generate models like this from lidar data and more recently to fill in missing data with a simple model (https://github.com/jawline/reflector/). Lots of the world has such data publicly available so its pretty cool to print your local area with recent data.