Artist and product designer Dom Riccobene specializes in creating data sculptures, or using real-world data to recreate locations. Unfortunately, many things have been closed for the past year, so he turned to video games as a creative outlet. Whether it be Grand Theft Auto V or Red Dead Redemption II, there was plenty of location data to be used. So, he decided to create a physical 3D map of San Andreas’ Los Santos. Read more for a video, additional pictures and information.
Even though all the data is contained within the video game, making a physical 3D map wasn’t as easy as you may think. Starting off, he had to use a custom script to scan the terrain and buildings in Read Dead Redemption II before porting it for use in Grand Theft Auto V. Put simply, the script runs in-game and collects ground elevations in a 500-1000 meter radius around the player when you press a hot key, adding up to over 1,000,000 data points per scan. Next, he had to merge the point clouds and turn the dataset into real-world data for manipulation with professional cartography software. When all was said and done, it took him 125-hours to complete the 3D GTA V map.
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti 4GB GDDR6 up to 1585MHz at 60W (75W with Dynamic Boost 2.0)
- Intel Core i7-11370H processor (12M Cache, up to 4.8GHz)
- 15.6” 144Hz IPS-Type Full HD (1920x1080) display with adaptive sync
I used a proprietary workflow to turn the tiled dataset into polygons as 3D printable meshes. Each tile is an 800 mb 3D model. From there it was a matter of trial and error dialing in my 3D printing settings to print buildings, terrain, and the water features in black, all at once. They also needed to fit together seamlessly as an assembly,” said Riccobene in an email to Kotaku.
