Thanks to 3D printers you can create true genius and some have wanted to use one to recreate in great detail the huge city of Los Santos of GTA V. The work is carried out by Rom Riccobene, who wanted to show the fantastic result through his account in Twitter, as you can well see in the video that accompanies the news.
This is a producer designer who from time to time uses real world data to recreate real locations in the form of data sculptures, so you already have a lot of experience in this field. Unfortunately for him, the coronavirus prevented him from leaving home and being able to do his job properly, which is why he could not think of any other way than to spend time recreating the scene of the Rockstar game.
Map of San Andreas for #FanArtFriday#GTA 5 #GTAOnline # 3dprinting pic.twitter.com/FdUfoquyvF
– Dom Riccobene (@DomRiccobene) August 6, 2021
So he wanted explain the process himself of how he has carried out this whole map:
To start with, I used a custom script to scan the terrain and buildings in Red Dead Redemption 2. Then I managed to port it for use in GTA V. It runs in-game and collects ground elevations in a radius of around 500-1,000 meters around of the player with the press of a hotkey, adding more than 1,000,000 data points per scan.
The next challenge was to merge the point clouds and convert the dataset into real-world data so that it could be manipulated, processed, and analyzed with professional mapping and mapping software.
Just to scan the map, as he had to do it by hand bit by bit because the map doesn’t load whole at once, the process took him around 100 hours in each game. As for the second challenge you comment on, you had to do a mapping of the 500 million coordinates that he had managed to scan.
Then, with all the data obtained, he was able to begin to create an elevation grid for the different buildings, mountains, etc. Thus, it would only be necessary to start printing the entire map, although some areas have so much detail that only some grids took between an hour and 12 hours to print in full, depending on the number of elements and elevations that were involved.
Ultimately, to print all the grids he created he had to wait about 125 hours. Therefore, between obtaining data, preparing the map with its elevated terrain and printing the pieces, it has been perfectly possible to take you more than 400 hours. It may seem like a lot, but its creator says it has been a lot of fun and his next project will be to do the same with the Red Dead Redemption 2 map.
