This “GTA 5” map comes from the 3D printer
A section of the 3D model of Los Santos. (Photo: Dom Riccoben)
What does it take to reproduce the virtual world from GTA5 in great detail? Custom software, a 3D printer, and a lot of patience. Dom Riccoben had it all.
Many people know the streets of Los Santos better than they do where they live. Since the release of “Grand Theft Auto 5” in 2013, every gamer has probably wandered through the high-rise canyons of the fictional metropolis. Always looking for the next adventure, the next mission. At some point you no longer needed a GPS to get to the Galileo Observatory, the view of the Maze Bank Tower is becoming everyday. Rockstar’s development studios put a lot of work and love into this virtual city.
A cool 3D map of Los Santos has now gone viral on Twitter. Behind the work of art is the Product designer Dom Riccoben, which normally reproduces existing locations with real data as exact data sculptures in 3D. For this, Riccoben visits these places. The corona pandemic prevented his work for a while, so the designer needed something new to pass the time at home. He decided to take a closer look at the worlds of “GTA V” and “Red Dead Redemption II” and be inspired.
From then on, he was pursuing the plan to create high-resolution data sets from both worlds, he reports in the Conversation with Kotaku. With this data he wants to create a huge, perfectly scaled physical 3D map of the game worlds. “In the beginning I used a custom script to first scan the grounds and buildings in RDR2,” he explains, “then I managed to port the script for use in ‘GTA 5’. It runs in the game and collects floor heights in a radius of 500 to 1,000 meters around the player when a hotkey is pressed that adds up to over a million data points per scan. “
Since the entire map is never displayed, Riccoben had to walk every meter by hand. According to his own account, it took him over 100 hours to do this – per game. In the last step, the more than 500 million collected coordinates had to be mapped and built into a height grid. Then the printing could begin. The individual tiles were sometimes in the printer for up to twelve hours. Each tile is an 800 megabyte 3D model. Just printing all the tiles took 125 hours. According to his own estimate, the designer has over 400 hours of pure working time. The result can also be more than impressive and maybe sweeten the time until GTA 6 appears – because that can still take years.
