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Data sculptures

Turn numbers into a map you can hold. Each region rises by its value, or your points stack up into hexagons, with colour classes for multi-colour printing and a raised legend on the front edge.

Data

Map

Numbers

Your data stays in this browser. Files and pasted tables are read on this page and never uploaded, and they are not saved in the link.

Or start from an example

World population US states Canada US counties A year of runs

Heights

Scale

Tallest Lowest (so every value prints)

Shape

Cells across

Colours

Colour classes

Class breaks

Base

Text

No data

Title and legend

Title Second line Raised legend with the class values Text in its own colour (an inlay in the 3MF) Engrave terraprinter.com after the source

The title, second line and data source are engraved into the front strip. Leave a box empty for the automatic text, or type a space for none.

Print

Width of the map Base thickness Gap between regionsGap between bars Projection Include Antarctica Show regions without data (low, in their own colour) Engrave coastlines and borders (areas wider than a city)

How it works

Your numbers, on a map

Paste a table or open a CSV with a column of names or codes and a column of values. Country names, ISO codes, US state names, postal abbreviations and FIPS codes, and Canadian province names in English or French are all recognised, with or without accents. Anything that does not match is listed so you can fix it.

Points and tracks

Open GPX, TCX, KML or GeoJSON files, or a CSV with latitude and longitude, and the points are counted into hexagons, squares or a smooth surface. Tracks are measured by distance, so a cell's height is the kilometres covered in it, however often your watch logged a point.

Heights and colours

Heights follow a linear, square-root or log scale, with a lowest height so zero still prints. Colours come in three to seven classes; with equal height steps each colour covers one band of heights, the same bands shown on the legend.

Printing in colour

The 3MF holds one object with a part for each colour, ready for a multi-colour printer. Regions and bars stand a fraction of a millimetre apart, so every part is a closed solid. The zip has one STL per colour, and one with everything but the text inlay for a one-colour print.

Boundaries: Natural Earth (public domain), via world-atlas; US states and counties: U.S. Census Bureau (public domain), via us-atlas. Sample data: World Bank World Development Indicators (CC BY 4.0), U.S. Census Bureau population estimates (public domain), Statistics Canada Table 17-10-0009-01 (Open Government Licence – Canada). The runs sample is made up. Make a full 3D model of a real place in the TerraPrinter app, or see more 3D map gift ideas.