Sydney from Lidar

This is a scale model of downtown Sydney, NSW, Australia, designed from LIDAR data. It covers a square 1.9km / 1.2mi / 6250' on a side. When printed in mm, it is 5 inches (12.7cm) at 1:15000 scale.

City models looks best when printed with 0.1 to 0.15mm layers, though keep the first layer 0.2 to 0.3mm thick for good bed adhesion. Speed it up by setting 0 bottom layers and only 2 perimeters. To reduce stringing, print cool (<200C for PLA) and use retractions. If you have a heat gun, crank it up and run it over the printed model quickly - that cleans up the remains of the stringers. Finally, ironing improves the appearance of the water and flat areas.

At Minicity.Art we've gathered and processed high-resolution LIDAR data for hundreds of cities and towns across the world. We then print models from 1:10000 to 1:2500 scale and 6 inches to 6 feet or more. Look for us on the web and Etsy.

If you found these files useful and want to see more, please click on like, post a make, or send me a suggestion. Thank you!

Mark
Founder, TinyMtn and MiniCity
http://minicity.art
http://minicityart.etsy.com

(C) 2025 Summer Street Map Company LLC
Models created using GDAL, LAStools, MeshLab, and other custom software
Data is © Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia) 2021, CC-BY-4.0