, After printing the Dallas model, Sonya wanted to know if I could print our own home city, Charlotte, NC.  I looked online for models and there are none, so I am going to design and print it from scratch.

​Starting with a satellite view of the city from Google maps I'm using SketchUp to model the buildings .  I made a screenshot of the city and imported the .jpg into SketchUp.  From there I can outline the base of the buildings and pull the model up out of the outline.  I am referencing skyscraperpage.com for building heights, then using Google maps and Bing maps satellite and street views to get details for the buildings.

I spent about 8 hours on the first building, the Westin hotel and then about 6 hours on the new Regions Bank building next to it.  Later I spent about 7 hours on the Duke Energy Center building, where I work.  Next to it is the Mint Museum, and Museum Tower apartment buildings which took me another 6 hours.  I then decided to tackle One Wells Fargo Center which took me about 14 hours.  What made it so difficult was that it is about 1 degree off of the X-Y axis in Sketchup and I didn't realize that one of the walls was automatically snapped to the green axis.  When I got to the top of the building, it wasn't symmetrical, so I basically had to tear it all down, find the stray line and rebuild it all.

Although it isn't a skyscraper, the Bank Of America stadium is a significant landmark in the city that I want to include in my model.  For this, I got a very zoomed in satellite image to base it on.  When I tried outlining the building in SketchUp, I found that my lines were not staying on top of the picture, which meant I couldn't see where one line ended to connect the next line.  Not knowing what to do, I "exploded" the .jpg image of the stadium and then my lines layed on top of it just fine.  I was in for a real surprise when I pulled the building up from the base because the image remained on the extrusion.  I was not expecting this at all.  I thought the extrusion would simply be the basic white material in SketchUp.  Then when I started manipulating the surfaces , I found that the image stuck to those too.  The result of 7 hours of design work was this really cool looking model below, which took about an hour to print

I published the BOA stadium model on Thingiverse HERE if you want to print one yourself

My son TJ II saw a 3D printed miniature of the city of Dallas and wondered if I could print it for him.  He had a link to the creators website ​​http://www.3dprintedskylines.com/  The creator was also kind enough to publish the design file n Thingiverse HERE.  Of course I wanted to print a really big model, around 18 inches from end to end. Scaling up the original model from Thingiverse was easy, but it was not easily chopped into seperate printable sized pieces, so I spent about 40 hours cleaning up the file.  I then seperated it into seven printable sized chunks and sent them to my X3REX modified Prusa i3 printer.  I also published my remixed design files on Thingiverse HERE.  After 48 hours and 38 minutes of printing and about 800 grams of ABS filament I have this really cool looking model