A 3D Printed Christmas: Sharing Our Locations ????
The run up to Christmas is one of our most busy times of year and here at 3D Prima, we have been hard at work trying to get every order out the door before the big day.
Now that we are coming to the end of the Christmas rush, we thought it would be nice to make something to give as a gift for our colleagues in Europe when we went over to Sweden for the staff Christmas party. What better opportunity is there to do something thoughtful and reflect on what we’ve achieved together over 2025?
This year, we wanted our Christmas gifts to be a little different. Something personal, something that represents both what we do and who we are. So we turned to map2model.com and created these custom 3D printed maps for each of our offices, one for us in the UK, and one each for the German office and our main site in Sweden.
Each map shows the local area around the office, turning a familiar place into something tactile and eye-catching. It’s not just a decoration, it’s a physical reminder of where each team is based and how we’re all connected, as well as being a brilliant example of what's possible with the printers we sell. It's also a great addition to our showrooms and a fantastic display print to take to trade shows around the world.
Of course, these came out so well that we couldn’t resist making a copy of each map for ourselves. So these will be coming with us to shows and events, and they’ll also be on display in our showroom in the UK for anyone who visits to enjoy, helping us tell the story of our international setup and sparking conversations about 3D printing, customisation, and creative applications.
Printing Details (For the Fellow Nerds ????)
I discovered map2model.com a while ago and ive been looking for an excuse to use it for a project ever since! It's all web based, free to use and surprisingly intuitive. It uses publicly available map data to generate the 3D model by just finding the area you want to make a print of, selecting it and the map is generated automatically. You get plenty of control over whether you want a flat map or whether you want to include topography data, and you can set the colours for each feature type easily. When you are finished and happy with the results, you can just export the map as a 3mf file with all the colour data you selected pre-built into the model.
The printer we used for these prints was the Bambu labs H2D. The reason I used this printer was because with the extra nozzle, I could get an extra colour in the print without having to hook up an extra AMS, and because we loaded the while as a background colour in the other hotend using the external spool holder, it saved a lot of print time and material as this was the colour it needed to swap between most. This brought the colour change time and purge waste down dramatically.
For the filaments, we used mostly Copymaster Turbo PLA for these prints, with the only exception being the green. For the green, I thought the Copymaster green looked a bit too bright for this application, so I used the Creality Hyper green instead, as this is more of a grass green that I thought was more appropriate for this application.
This combination gave us excellent detail, clean colour separation, and a reliable finish and easily repeatable finish, perfect for display pieces that need to look similar to each other.
We’re really proud of how they turned out, and even more excited to see them on desks, in offices, and at events in the year ahead.
From all of us in the UK office, Merry Christmas to you and our colleagues in Germany and Sweden! Here’s to another year of great projects, shared ideas, and plenty more 3D printing. ????????
