You have fans and you have fans. But this GTA fan is next level and prints the complete San Andreas map in 3D!
It’s actually a kind of art, this 3D printed copy of GTA’s map. Players who have played the map a lot agree: the thing is perfectly recreated. This way you also see how much detail and therefore time the developer Rockstar has put into it.
GTA fan print San Andreas
The 3D print is made by means of Dom Riccobene. He is a product designer who often uses real world data to recreate actual locations as exact ‘data sculptures’. But because corona came, Riccobene couldn’t go outside to do his job. And so he had some time to spare. He looked to the virtual worlds of GTA V and Red Dead Redemption II for inspiration.
So he made a plan. This includes high-resolution data sets from both RDR2 and GTA V. He then used that data to create huge, perfectly scaled, physical 3D maps of the game worlds. He described the process as “an enormous technical challenge.”
“To start with, I used a custom script to first scan the grounds and buildings in RDR2,” Riccobene explains in an email to the Kotaku website. “Then I managed to port it for use in GTA V. It runs in-game and collects ground heights in a 500-1000 meter radius around the player when you press a hotkey, which adds up to 1,000,000+ data points per scan yields.”
Precision work
The games do not appear all at once on the entire map. Therefore, Riccobene had to scan the card slowly by hand using this process. He estimates that it took him about 100 hours per game before he had enough data for his data sculptures.
To do this, he mapped all 500 million coordinates he had scanned and collected into actual coordinates on Earth. This allowed him to create an elevation grid. This allowed him to use his software and tools to print the map in 3D. Obviously a lot of time went into it. But the result may be there!
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