Citygrid – Laser Cut City Map

Inspired from different lasercut art projects we thought about making a city-grid map from wood. This worked out to be a very nice birthday present for a friend who moved recently to another location. Feel free to guess the city 😉

Geodata Processing

We used street and geodata from OpenStreetMap. Roads and Waterways got buffered to be around 11m (Small Roads and Waterways) and 22m (Large Roads), to get from single line paths to polygons.

Everything got engraved/cut with a scale of 1:11000.

Prototype/Proof-of-concept model has a size of 10cm*15cm.

Big scale model has a size of 58cm*58cm.

Material

Layers – Poplar plywood 4mm & 6mm
Prototype Lake – light blue acryl 3mm
Lakes & Waterways – blue clay paper
Semi-matt transparent spray paint

Software

Cutting Process

There are a lot of different approaches to engraving and cutting the processed vector graphics.

Since this was a quite big file (58cm * 58cm), I decided to engrave the different layers step by step instead of all at once with an inserted rasterized image. That way I had more control over different steps in case of (most feared) buffer errors. Of course this approach took quite some time and the cutter ran for over 12 hours!

We used our beloved Lasersaur with an 100W CO₂ Laser at FREILab.

Layer	Speed	Intensity	Stepover	Duration	Material	Style
Buildings	6000	25%	0,2mm	4,5h	6mm poplar	Engraving
Buildings Stroke	2000	25%		Skipped		Engraving
Railways	2000	40%		5m		Engraving
Natural Areas (Grassland)	6000	20%	0,4mm	2,1h		Engraving
Natural Areas (Trees)	6000	15%	0,4mm	1,7h		Engraving
Cemeteries	6000	15%	0,2mm	5m		Engraving
Lakes & Waterways & Frame	1300	100%		7m		Cutting
Streets Small	1400	100%		3,5h	4mm poplar	Cutting
Streets Large	1400	100%		7m	4mm poplar	Cutting
Backplate (Frame)	1400	100%		2m	4mm poplar	Cutting