mapa 🌍

mapa let's you create 3d-printable STL files from satellite elevation data (using DEM data).

Under the hood mapa uses:

• numpy and numba to crunch large amounts of data in little time
• ALOS DEM satellite data (max resolution of 30m) provided by Planetary Computer

Installation

pip install mapa

Usage

mapa provides the following approaches for creating STL files:

1. Using the mapa streamlit web app 🎈

Certainly the easiest way to interact with mapa is to use the streamlit web app. No need to install anything. Simply access it via your browser. It is based on the mapa-streamlit repo and can be accessed at:

https://3dmaps.streamlit.app/

Note, that the streamlit web app however, does not use the maximal available resolution of the ALOS DEM GeoTIFFs, as it would take too much time and cloud resources to compute STL files of e.g. multiple GBs. If you are keen in getting STL files with the highest resolution possible, I'd recommend following the next step.

2. Using the mapa interactive map 🗺

The second easiest way is using the mapa cli. After installing mapa, simply type

mapa

A jupyter notebook will be started with an interactive map. Follow the described steps by executing the cells to create a 3d model of whatever place you like.

Choose bounding box	Create STL file

Slice STL file	3D print

3. Using the dem2stl cli 💻

The dem2stl cli lets you create a 3d-printable STL file based on your tiff file. You can run a demo computation to get a feeling of how the output STL will look like:

dem2stl --demo

If you have your tiff file at hand, you may run something like

dem2stl --input your_file.tiff --output output.stl --model-size 200 --z-offset 3.0 --z-scale 1.5

The full list of options and their intention can be found with dem2stl --help:

Usage: dem2stl [OPTIONS]

  🌍 Convert DEM data into STL files 🌏

Options:
  --input TEXT          Path to input TIFF file.
  --output TEXT         Path to output STL file.
  --as-ascii            Save output STL as ascii file. If not provided, output
                        file will be binary.
  --model-size INTEGER  Desired size of the (larger side of the) generated 3d
                        model in millimeter.
  --max-res             Whether maximum resolution should be used. Note, that
                        this flag potentially increases compute time
                        dramatically. The default behavior (i.e.
                        max_res=False) should return 3d models with sufficient
                        resolution, while the output stl file should be < ~400
                        MB.
  --z-offset FLOAT      Offset distance in millimeter to be put below the 3d
                        model. Defaults to 4.0. Is not influenced by z-scale.
  --z-scale FLOAT       Value to be multiplied to the z-axis elevation data to
                        scale up the height of the model. Defaults to 1.0.
  --demo                Converts a demo tif of Hawaii into a STL file.
  --ensure-squared      Flag to toggle whether the output model should be
                        squared in x- and y-dimension. When enabled it will
                        remove pixels from one side to ensure same length for
                        both sides.
  --version             Show the version and exit.
  --help                Show this message and exit.

4. Using mapa as python library 📚

In case you are building your own application you can simply use mapa's functionality within your application by importing the functions of the module.

from mapa import convert_tiff_to_stl

path_to_stl = convert_tiff_to_stl(
    input_file="path/to/your/input_file.tiff",
    as_ascii=False,
    model_size=200,
    output_file="path/to/your/output_file.stl",
    max_res=False,
    z_offset=3.0,
    z_scale=1.5,
    ensure_squared: bool = False,
)

Algorithm Deep Dive

In case you are curios about the algorithm which turns a GeoTIFF into a STL file, I'd recommend reading the header of algorithm.py.

Changelog

See Releases.

Contributing

Contributions, feedback or issues are welcome.