Mount Everest

Printing Mount Everest properly

Everest is the first thing almost everyone makes on a terrain generator, and most of the results are disappointing. Here is why, and how to get one worth putting on a shelf.

The problem with printing Everest

Type "Everest" into any map-to-model tool and the instinct is to frame the whole Khumbu — Everest, Lhotse, Nuptse, Ama Dablam, the glaciers, the trekking route, all of it. Press print and what comes out is a slightly wrinkled biscuit.

The mountain is not missing. The scale is.

Everest rises 8,848.86 m above sea level, a figure Nepal and China finally agreed on together and announced in December 2020. But nothing on a printed map measures from sea level. What you see is the difference between the highest point in your frame and the lowest, squeezed into whatever width you chose. Get that ratio wrong and the tallest mountain on Earth turns into gentle bumps.

Here is the same summit, same print width of 150 mm, same one-to-one height, measured three ways:

Box around the summitHeights in itRangeThe model stands

4 km6,431 – 8,735 m2,304 m90.4 mm

8 km5,492 – 8,730 m3,238 m64.8 mm

20 km4,433 – 8,721 m4,288 m36.2 mm

Read that twice, because it is the whole article. The 20 km box contains almost twice the vertical range of the 4 km box — 4,288 m against 2,304 m — and prints at less than half the height. Widening the frame adds relief in metres and destroys it in millimetres, because the scale shrinks faster than the range grows.

Everest at 20 km across is a range of hills. Everest at 4 km across is a spike you could hurt yourself on.

Why Everest needs no exaggeration at all

Most terrain models need vertical exaggeration. A river delta, a city, an English county — stretch them 5× or 15× or nothing shows up.

Everest is one of the few places on the planet where exaggeration is actively wrong. The arithmetic:

relief on the print (mm) = (height range m / box width m) x print width mm x exaggeration

For the 8 km box:

(3238 / 8000) x 150 x 1 = 60.7 mm

Sixty millimetres of mountain on a 150 mm plate, at 1×, before you have touched a single setting. The measured model comes out at 64.8 mm once the base is included.

Push that to 2× and you get a 130 mm spike that no longer resembles Everest, prints with visible layer banding down every face, and tells anyone who knows the mountain that you did not look at a photograph. The Himalaya does not need help. Leave the slider at 1×, or let the automatic setting find it for you — it lands on 1× here, which is the tool telling you the same thing.

What the elevation data actually knows

Worth being straight about this, because it will look like a bug otherwise.

The model's summit reads about 8,730 m, not 8,848.86 m. Roughly 115 m short, and consistent across every box size above.

Two reasons, both honest. The elevation is sampled on a grid — very roughly 10–30 m between samples in most of the world — and a summit is a point. The grid almost never lands exactly on it, so the highest sample is a little down the side. On top of that, radar elevation data has known gaps in high mountains, where steep terrain and snow return poor signal, and those gaps get filled from coarser sources. High Himalayan summits are exactly where that bites.

So: the shape of the mountain is right, the ridges are right, the valleys are right, and the peak is a hair low. For a printed object this matters not at all — nobody measures a model with an altimeter. But if you label it "8,848 m", know that you are labelling it from the survey and not from the mesh.

Contour lines, and why Everest suits them

A single-colour terrain print is a shape. Add contour lines and it becomes a map — and more practically, it gives a grey or white print something to catch the light on, which is the difference between a model that photographs well and one that looks like a lump.

Set at real metres so they mean what a map reader expects. For the 8 km box the automatic interval comes out at 200 m, which is right: roughly sixteen lines from valley floor to summit, close enough to read the steepness of the Lhotse Face at a glance, open enough that they do not merge into corduroy.

Go finer than 100 m here and the lines start touching on the steep ground. Go coarser than 250 m and the mountain loses its definition. At 20 km across the automatic interval moves to 250 m on its own, which is the right instinct — a bigger box needs coarser lines, not more of them.

Keep them at least 0.8 mm wide on FDM. That is two perimeters at a 0.4 mm nozzle, and anything thinner will come out broken on the steep faces.

Four boxes worth printing

All centred on 27.9881° N, 86.9250° E unless stated.

1. The summit pyramid — 4 km

The most dramatic object of the four, and the one people pick up. 2,304 m of range at 150 mm gives a model 90 mm tall. Nothing but the summit pyramid, the South Col and the top of the Lhotse Face. No context, no trekking route, just the mountain. Contours at 100 m.

2. The classic — 8 km

The best all-rounder and the one to make first. Everest, the South Col, the top of the Western Cwm and a real sense of how the mountain sits among its neighbours. 64.8 mm tall. Contours at 200 m. This is the one that reads correctly from across a room.

3. The horseshoe — Everest, Lhotse and Nuptse

Widen to about 10–12 km and frame slightly south, and you capture the great cirque: Everest at 8,848 m, Lhotse at 8,516 m — the fourth highest mountain on Earth and barely a named ridge away — and the long wall of Nuptse at 7,861 m closing the Western Cwm.

This is the view that makes people who have been there go quiet, because it is what you actually see from Kala Patthar. It is also the honest answer to "how close together are they?", which no photograph ever conveys. Rotate the frame rather than leaving it north-up: aligning it along the Cwm makes a far better object than a square pointing at the pole.

4. The trek — Base Camp with the route on it

Import a GPX of the Lukla to Base Camp trek and raise it on a 25–30 km plate. The mountain becomes the backdrop and the walk becomes the subject: Namche, Tengboche, Dingboche, Lobuche, Gorak Shep, Base Camp at around 5,364 m.

It will print flat — 25 km across is well past the point where relief survives, so use 2× or 3× here and do not feel bad about it. The point of this one is the line, not the mountain. For somebody who has done the walk, it is a far better gift than the summit.

Printing it

Everest is unusually easy to print, for one reason: it is a heightfield. There are no overhangs anywhere, no matter how vertical the Lhotse Face looks. If your slicer asks for supports, something is wrong — almost always a water channel cut deeper than the base.

Layer height0.16 mm. Terrain is all slope, and slope is where layer lines show. 0.12 mm is visibly better and takes twice as long.

Perimeters3

Infill12%. The top surface is fully carried by the walls.

SupportsNone.

Brim5 mm at 150 mm wide and up.

Base4 mm. Go to 5–6 mm if you are printing bigger than 180 mm.

MaterialPLA. Matte, not glossy — matte grey or bone white photographs like a museum piece, glossy looks like a toy.

Slow the top solid infill to 30–40 mm/s. On a terrain model nearly the entire visible surface is top solid infill, so it is the one setting that changes how the finished thing looks.

Print it in the orientation it comes out of the software — flat, summit up. Do not tilt it to "improve" the faces. You will only add supports and scars.

Colour

Three approaches, in increasing order of effort.

One colour. Matte white or light grey, contour lines catching the shadow. This is the one that looks most like a serious object and the one I would recommend first. It also prints in a single go with no swaps.

Two colours, one nozzle. Print the terrain in grey and put a colour change at the layer where the contour lines begin. Every slicer has a change-at-layer function, and the 3MF export keeps the contours as their own part so the slicer shows you exactly which layer that is.

Snow line. The trick that makes people look twice: set a colour change at the layer corresponding to about 7,000 m and print everything above it in white. It is not real glaciology — permanent snow on Everest starts lower and moves — but as an object it is striking, and it makes the height legible without a single label.

Making the files

Open mapsto3d.com — that link is already framed on the 8 km box.

Under Layers, switch on Contour lines.

Under Look → Contour lines, leave the interval on automatic (it picks 200 m) or set it yourself. Width 0.8 mm, height 0.6 mm.

Under Print, width 150 mm, base 4 mm. Leave terrain height on automatic.

Under Export: 3MF for multi-colour, STL for single, or STLs for a zip of one file per colour.

It is free, there is no account, no watermark and no export limit, and the model is built in your browser rather than on someone's server.

Change the coordinates in the link and you have K2, Denali, the Matterhorn, or the hill you can see from your window.

Credit

Elevation from AWS Terrain Tiles. Map data from OpenStreetMap contributors, licensed ODbL. Imagery from Esri.

Print one for yourself or give one away and none of this needs thinking about. If you sell prints or republish the files, read the licences — and credit OpenStreetMap either way. It is one line, and it is the only thing those volunteers ask for.