 We just made these custom laser-cut 3D city maps, and it only took 15 minutes to make the final. And we'll show you how we did it right now. What is up? A welcome back. Do you like to do it, Vilda to make it? So do we. And we have a new video each week. This week, we're digging deep into some pockets with some 3D laser-cut city maps. Everybody loves a good gift that evokes an emotional response, like something with your name on it or something with your hometown on it. And we're going to show you the fastest way to turn your city into a 3D map. Step one, we're going to gather all of our supplies. We needed some eighth inch Baltic birch, some paint, some stain, and some glue. And that is it. Step two, we're going to make all of our cuts. But first, we need to download a map of our city. Our first stop is going to be at snazzymaps.com. This is a great place to find stylized maps that are based off of Google Maps. We're going to start by exploring styles. And then I've already searched around, and the best maps that I can find for this are labeled Glowforge. I've searched laser, I've searched laser names and stuff. And the best thing that I found is just typing in Glowforge. And you'll see that it's got a good map right here that some anonymous person put together for us. It looks like it's got four or five colors in it. So this is what we're going to start with. Once our stylized map loads, I'm going to go and look for the city that I'm looking for. And we live in Richmond, so that's where I'm going to start. And that's it. There she is. Richmond. Is that your hometown, Ken? It is my hometown. There's a river running right through it. So we're just going to start by downloading the image. Now once I click download, it's going to ask me to register for downloading these images. And I'm just going to put in a fake name and address. Testy Testerson. And my password is probably going to be Tester2. Now everyone knows your username and password. But you guys can use it, but don't do anything malicious. I'm going to click download image one more time. And I want this image as big as possible. So I'm going to make it a thousand pixels by a thousand pixels. And on export, I want a scale factor of three times. That way, when I do export this, it exports as a PNG. And it'll be huge. It'll have lots of pixels for Illustrator to work with. So you can zoom in, zoom out with more detail. Zoom in, zoom out with more detail. And the image trace tool inside Illustrator will be able to pick up more pixels, give you a little more detail. I'm just finding a good meaty spot of the city. You know, the picks up most of the city. So you can recognize it. And we're going to download this image. This image is going to download as a PNG file. So it's picture. We'll select it, right click, open with Adobe Illustrator. And you see it comes in huge. Move them right in the middle of the river. It's 41 inches by 41 inches. So it's big and it should give the image trace tool plenty to work with. So we'll find that in the windows, image trace. Let's select off and select the image we want to trace. I'm going to start with a basic preset of three colors. It'll process my image. It's turning these pixels into math formulas or coordinates. I'm going to zoom in to see what kind of detail I have. The highways have become part of the the river. Let's separate that. I'm going to bring it up to five different colors. So now I see my little streets, my main streets, and my highways. The main streets or the little streets are looking a little fuzzy. So we're going to bring those pixels down or the noise down to five pixels. This will kind of take some of the blur out and tighten up the lines a little bit. Now if you don't want to process your picture each time you change something, you can unselect preview. And once you're done making all your changes, you can select preview again and it'll process it just the one time. I just tweak the paths in the corners until everything looks like a street. It doesn't have to be super detailed because this is 41 inches right now and we're going to shrink it. But since we converted it to vector, it will shrink and it should keep all of its detail when we shrink it now. So let's expand this and expanding it actually creates the vector. We'll ungroup it so each color or each little path is its own little piece now. Now we're going to separate this into layers. So I'm going to select the white and say select same appearance. Now we're going to group all of the white so they're all together and then I can hide that layer. Now we're going to select the pink and say select same appearance. We've grouped all the pink together, control G and hide it. I'm going to hide it. Get it out of the way. Too much. We're going to do the same for the blue. Select same appearance, control G to group it and we're going to do the same for highways but I think everything's touching on the highway. Select same appearance, group control G and the same for the river water. The river water. We'll group it. Now you can see everything is a lot better. Instead of having a thousand little paths everywhere, we now have just five or six layers. So all of the little roads are on the layer. All of the big roads are on the layer and the river is on its own layer. I'm going to select everything now and I'm going to scale it down to 12 inches and because it's vector based, if I zoom in, everything looks the same. It doesn't get fuzzy. It doesn't get pixelated. The white area represents land but this is not a solid piece of land or a solid backer. Those are just bits and pieces of white. So we're going to create a solid backer to represent the land mass. We're going to make the 12 by 12 so it matches our map. Our map is 12 by 12 and we're going to center it and then we'll put this layer on the bottom. We'll drag it to the bottom. Now we're going to replace the white so we don't really need the white but I'm going to duplicate this square, this layer and this is going to become our new land. We'll get rid of the white. So let's make this new land white. Oops, I need some colors. So I need to add some colors to this so I come up to my swatches and I can add any of these colors or any of these color swatches to it but I have my own default laser swatches so that's what I'm going to use. Now I don't have white so I'm going to turn the land yellow. There you go. There's my new land. I'm going to turn some of these layers off so they get out of my way. I don't need to see these right now. I just want to see the river and the land because I'm going to take the river and make it a real river out of our new land. So I'm going to select both layers and then I'm going to use my pathfinder tool. It's a window so you can go to windows, pathfinder and then I'm going to do minus front because the river is in front of the land right now. So now I just subtracted the river from that piece of land and you can see, see this river back here? It's actually the solid layer on the back. And that's what's going to make this 3D. So let's bring back our roads. Oh, they're behind my land. When we move the land down, we'll bring back my roads. This is busy. It'll be a lot of cuts. I don't need that many layers. So we're going to merge these two layers using the pathfinder tool. I'm going to change it blue so I can see them a little better. And there's my tiny roads. I got my big roads and then I have my land. We can get rid of this white piece now. It's just a bunch of junk. All right, my map's looking pretty good but it does need a frame on it. I need to frame everything. I need the highways to stay together. I'm going to need the river to kind of stay together since the river divides it down the middle. I'm going to have a bunch of little pieces. So I copy the rectangle. I remove the fill and I'm going to add a stroke to it. We'll make it a 20 point stroke and we'll make it an internal stroke. That way this map will stay 12 inches. All right, it looks pretty good. We think him. I think that's right. It connects all the secondary and primary roads together. It'll make it a lot easier to glue together. So let's merge some of these layers with this new frame that we just made. So I'm going to stroke this frame that way this stroke or this line actually becomes an object. We'll duplicate this layer a few times. Duplicate it twice. Because you're going to attach this frame to each layer. Yes, I'm going to attach this frame to each layer. So let's start by merging this with the highways and those main roads. We'll go to our pathfinder tool and we'll select merge. You see a change color because it merged with the frame. Let's turn this back to blue and then let's merge this frame with the the land frame. That way this land will be all one piece and I'll be able to glue it down and it won't give me. It looks like it's a bunch of little pieces. I'll cut this map right in half. But if I merge it now we have one piece that we can lay down and glue. And then the little secondary roads or the tiny roads I'm actually going to engrave. So I'm going to leave them how they are. They don't need a frame. So the bottom layer is now our water. That yellow layer is now our land that you can see the water through. That will engrave the secondary roads onto right the yellow layer. Let's bring this down a little bit just to 11.75. Make sure it fits in the bed of the small laser. I want to label this so that we know what city we're actually looking at since there's no labels on the city. So it's Richmond VA. A little wimpy. Let's make it a little beefier. I thought if I capitalized it it would look a little more beefy. Let's give this a thicker font. Aerial. What do you think about aerial black? That's a thick one. Definitely be able to read it. All right now I want this word to be attached to the frame. I want it to be a part of this frame. So from here I'm going to go to my type menu. I'm always quick to use a shortcut. I'm going to go to my type menu and I'm going to create outlines. This makes that font an object. These are now objects. So now I can merge this object with this frame object using the Pathfinder tool in Unite. There now Richmond VA is part of that frame. See? Yep. Now I can start to separate this and get it ready to cut. So you see I have all my layers. Now let's group the tiny roads in the land so that I can slide them to the side all together. There you go. These are all my layers. I have that blue layer is the backer which is the water. I have the land which has the roads engraved into it. And then I have the highways and the main roads. So I'm going to take the fill out of everything. I'm going to give everything that I'm going to cut a stroke of red. It's real red. And then I'm going to take the engraved piece and I'm going to leave that filled as black because that's going to be engraved. Now let's export this as an SVG. I'm just going to name it Richmond 3D City Map. Let's head over to Lightburn and we're going to import this SVG that we just exported. And there it is. Look at that. I think we're about ready to cut. Let's line it up. You know I should have actually made this whole file horizontal. I don't know why I dragged the highways out of the way. So let's go ahead and move that. Oh, I forgot to group it first. Yeah, Richmond split. I see. All right, hold on. Let me get out of here. Control Z. Okay, these are all these pieces. Yeah, let me Control Z to put the Richmond back together. All right, we'll group the frame, the exterior frame. Make sure all the little internal pieces move with it. All right, let's group the roads with their frame to make sure all little roads stay where the roads are supposed to be. And move that into place. I'm going to group the land with the tiny roads, the engraving. And it looks like 11.75. It's still just outside my cut area. Let's line them up middle. Now I'm just going to, with everything selected and the perspective locked, I'm just going to change this to 11 and a half inches. I thought I would try 11.65, still a little big, 11.5. All right, this fits. I think we're about ready to cut. So let me check my settings. I'm going to go to the Omtech website because I'm using Omtech Polo Laser and I'm going to check the recommended settings for the 50 watt laser. We're using eighth inch. This is 10 millimeters a second and 26 percent power. And what was my, my engraved speed and power? Let's go check Omtech again. Engrave settings, wood, 50 watts, 150 millimeters a second, 21 percent power. And for this, I'm going to want this to be filled. So let's fill this and I want my lines per inch close to 300. They don't need to be exactly 300. I think 298.82 looks fine for me. Okay. All right, let's go power up the laser and get this going. Now that the laser's on, I can see exactly where this is going to land. So I'm going to enable my camera and update my overlay. And now I can see where the board is and we can actually position the map where it, where it goes on the board. Zoom out. All right. This looks good. I can't wait to cut this thing. Let's go get it cut. Yeah, it looks good. I'm excited. Paint and stain. And we're trying to keep this with a neutral color scheme. So we're only going to paint the back of this where the river will show through blue. The rest of it, we're going to just stain it. We're going to leave the land mass in a natural color and then we're going to do a dark stained highway and frame. Dark stained highway. Dark stained highway. Sounds like an 80 song. 812. I made mine a little bit bigger. That's, you guys know how he does. He went off to the other room and says, I'm going to wave in it. I'm going to make another one and then he comes back with a bigger one. Just a little bit bigger. So for mine, I'm going to give it a little sanding first because I have a little more char on mine. This looks great. Mine looks great. But I'm going to just take off a little bit of that char. This is probably 220 sanding block here. And then once I finish sanding it, I want to blow it out with some compressed air because I'll need to get all of that sanding dust out of the engraved sections. Watch our channel a lot. You know that we use these foam rollers with the paint. See what Garrett's doing over there. We don't normally use them for stain. You can, but they will not keep like the rollers will keep in the baggies. The stain will not keep. But because I'm using this little or trying to stain this little map here with so much open or sparse area, I'm going to roll right over these interstate lines. Don't make a mess. This just works perfect for this job. But I'll have to throw this roller away when I'm done. Time to assemble it. We're going to bring it all together with some of this star bond thick. We're just going to glue a one layer on top of the other layers. Now with these tiny little interstate roads, you do not want to use a ton of glue because this glue does dry a little hazy. So you don't want it squeezing out everywhere. You're going to try and keep it just behind the interstates. And each bottle of this star bond comes with about 10 of these little micro tips. This is the perfect use for the micro tip. Let me put it on there and kind of show you. Look how tiny that tip gets. And then we're going to just dab little dots. You don't need to do a full line. We don't need to do every interstate road. So little dots are your friend. Little dots are your friend. Labor $65. That's right. So actually $65 for both of them because they were each a three hour cut time. The larger design on the larger laser, three hours. Smaller design on the smaller laser, still three hours. We pay our laser $15 an hour. That's $45 in labor for the cut time. And then it was about $15 or one hour for glue, paint, stain. So add that together and materials. We're at about $5 and 40 cents for materials and that ends up being the same. We use pretty much the same materials. Although Garrett's is a one side finished ply for his backer. Mine is completely unfinished. So they ended up both being about $5. So all in $65 in materials and labor. We factor in, it depends. You can choose how much profit you want. Maybe a 50% profit that puts each of them at about $100. Now of course you can charge more for the larger one. And then if you want to add a frame, you can add a little more for a frame. Came out of the frame to this big 18 incher. And then I didn't have a frame for this small one. Actually I did. I just gave it to Goodwill. It's killing me. But this gives you an idea of what these look like framed. It really takes them to the next level. So these are real easy to make. You watch us make the file in real time. We sped up the paint but has a great profit margin. Out of frame I've seen these in upwards of 300 bucks on Etsy. So I think you can make a good chunk of change. Yeah we're getting ready to do Arts in the Park. And I think these are a perfect seller for Arts in the Park. Especially if we frame them like this. It's a local show. Yeah people love local. A lot of high-end art type items. It's not just a craft show. This is Arts in the Park. Arts in the Park. Yeah so this is yeah. This is art. Yes. Yeah. All right we are about at a time. So if you're not going to join us for the Patreon after show we will see you next week where we'll do it, build it and make it again. Oh and remember on Tuesdays, catch us live or we're usually painting something. You know, we'll test cut Tuesday. Test cut Tuesday. I'm going to give mine a balance. Your frame isn't really attached. Yeah I can't really do that.