Terrain Press

Turn real NASA elevation data into 3D-printable ornaments and jigsaw puzzles. Free, open source, no account, no paywall.

Pick a place on Earth, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Ceres, Vesta, Venus or Pluto, choose a shape and a size, and download print-ready STL and 3MF files. Everything is computed in your browser from real measurements; nothing is uploaded anywhere.

Use it now: https://ianbauters.github.io/terrain-press/

What's new: see the changelog or the releases.

Why this exists

There are services that charge per download for exactly this kind of file. The elevation data behind them is public domain, paid for by taxpayers and published by NASA, the USGS and their partners for anyone to use. Terrain Press is a free alternative: the tool itself is open source, and so is every file it makes.

What it makes

• Ornaments: a terrain disc, square or hexagon in a frame, with optional lettering (place name and coordinates) and a hanging loop.
  • Print it as one piece, or as two single-colour prints (terrain + frame) if you don't have a multi-colour printer.
• Jigsaw puzzles cut to follow the shape: rings for circles, nested hexagons for hexagons, a grid for squares.
  • A large centre piece keeps the landmark whole.
  • A closed-back tray holds the pieces.
  • The pieces come spread apart on one plate, and also as one STL per piece with a numbered map, so a lost piece is a single reprint.
  • Each piece can have its number engraved underneath, and the tray floor can get a knurled texture so pieces lift out easily.
• A knurled outer edge for frames and trays, a criss-cross grip texture.
• A print guide (PDF) with every download: settings, filament estimates and a page per print plate.
• An A4 poster (PDF) with every download, light and dark: the place drawn as stacked contour layers, with its name and coordinates.
• Settings: relief exaggeration, rim height, base thickness, clearances, three lettering styles and mesh detail.

Landmarks are built in: 41 places on Earth from the Matterhorn to the Challenger Deep, every Apollo landing site, Mars landers and rovers from Viking to Perseverance, the Soviet Venus landers, Rheasilvia on Vesta, Sputnik Planitia on Pluto and more. Or click anywhere on the globe.

Run it yourself

Docker (NAS, home server):

docker run -d --name terrain-press -p 8085:80 --restart unless-stopped ghcr.io/ianbauters/terrain-press:latest

Then open http://<your-server>:8085. Images are built for amd64, arm64 and armv7, so they run on Intel and ARM Synology, QNAP, Raspberry Pi and so on.

Prefer Compose (Synology Container Manager → Project)? Use the docker-compose.yml in this repo.

Any web server: the site/ folder is the whole app. Copy it anywhere that serves static files, or try it locally:

python3 -m http.server 8080 --directory site

It works fully offline: all libraries, fonts and elevation data are bundled. The one exception is fine detail on Earth: for small places the browser loads open elevation tiles from Amazon (AWS Terrain Tiles), which tells Amazon roughly which area you're looking at. Offline, Earth falls back to its bundled global grid (about 5 km per sample) and says so.

Developing

The page is built from source/:

npm install
python3 source/build.py   # writes site/index.html, core.js, worker.js and site/lib/

• source/core.js holds the geometry: elevation sampling, triangulation, jigsaw cuts, frames, lettering, and the STL/3MF/ZIP writers.
• source/worker.js runs it off the main thread.
• source/app.js and source/src.html are the interface (Bootstrap 5, three.js).

docs/DATA.md describes every dataset, how it was processed and the tile format, if you want to add a world.

Credits and licence

Terrain Press is © Ian Bauters and contributors, licensed under the GNU AGPL-3.0-or-later (LICENSE).

• You may use, change and share it freely.
• If you run a modified version as a public website, you must publish your source code too.
• Files you make with it are yours, and the underlying data is public domain.

Elevation data comes from NOAA, NASA, the USGS Astrogeology Science Center, DLR and the NASA Planetary Data System; Earth's fine detail from AWS Terrain Tiles. Libraries and fonts are under MIT, BSD, Boost and SIL OFL licences. Full details are in CREDITS.md and LICENSES/.

This is a decorative representation, not survey-grade data, and is not endorsed by NOAA, NASA, the USGS or DLR.