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Your life map

The places that matter in a life on one map: where you were born, studied, met, married and live now. Each place is a small 3D close-up with its streets and buildings, sitting in its own socket, and raised arcs join them in order with the dates.

The places

Click the map to add a place, drag a pin to move it. The dashed box is what the print shows.

Or start from an example

The map

Width Shape

Room around the places Mountain height

Sea in its own colour Country borders, pressed in

The close-ups

Size

Building and hill height

How far around each place a close-up shows is set on each place above.

Printed as

Fit in the socket

Magnets (6 × 2 mm discs) to hold them

Each close-up is its own piece that drops into its socket, with a tab so north always lines up. Print them in other colours than the base, swap them later, or glue them in.

Journey and words

Title along the bottom

Names Arcs

Arrows showing the way Engrave terraprinter.com underneath

Letters

The letters are cut in a Latin font: accents such as é, ñ, ø and ł are kept, but other scripts (Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Chinese and so on) can't be engraved yet and are left out. Write those names in Latin letters.

Colours

Water in the close-ups uses the sea colour. In the 3MF every colour is its own named part.

Your printer

Print bed

A map wider than your bed is split into tiles that join with short pins of 1.75 mm filament.

Download

Free for personal use, and for selling up to $5,000 a year with a TerraPrinter credit. Bigger sellers need a commercial license. Keep the data credits. License

How your life map is made

A map that fits the story

Three places in one city get a town map; a country or a continent gets a map centred on your places; a life that crosses oceans gets a world map, turned so no journey is cut at the edge. The land is in gentle relief from real elevation data, the sea flat and in its own colour.

A close-up of each place

Every place gets a round or hexagonal close-up: the ground, the buildings at their real heights, the streets pressed in and the water sunk, from 300 m to 2 km around the spot. Tunnels, underground and indoor features are never drawn.

The journey

Raised arcs follow the shortest route over the globe from one place to the next, in the order you put them, with an arrow showing the way. Each place gets its words and date beside it, and the title and names run along the bottom.

Ideas to try

An anniversary or wedding present (where you met, got engaged, married, live now), a retirement gift of every posting, a leaving present for someone moving away, the homes of a family over the generations, or a gap year around the world.

Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL). Elevation: Mapzen Terrain Tiles on AWS (SRTM, GMTED2010, ETOPO1 and others). Borders: Natural Earth (public domain). Map © OpenStreetMap contributors, © CARTO. Want just one place? Make your home in 3D, a wall map or a map ornament, open the TerraPrinter app or see more 3D map gift ideas.