Everything the studio does, in the order you'll meet it. Skim the three steps, then come back for the settings when a cut disappoints you.
Click once to start, move, click again to finish. Or paste a Google Maps URL into the Area field and press enter — a box appears around that spot. A single lat/lng gives you roughly a one-mile box.
Cut shape: rectangle, circle or hexagon. Standard accounts go up to 10 × 10 miles.
Pick laser cut or 3D print first — every setting below follows that choice. Then toggle buildings, roads, water, parks and rail, and set your sizes in millimetres.
Preview as many times as you want. Previews are free.
One credit is spent here — three if terrain elevation is on. Downloads are free and unlimited afterwards, and the job stays in My Maps.
Dense city blocks take a few minutes. Elevation takes longer.
The box you draw is the map. Everything else — how long it takes, how busy it looks, how much of it survives the cut — follows from how much ground you put inside it.
Roads expand into ten types so you can keep the arterials and drop the driveways. On a dense city, residential and service are usually what turn a map into mush.
Motorway, trunk, primary, secondary, tertiary, residential, service, paths. Bridges and tunnels are export-only toggles — the preview always draws them.
Rivers, lakes, coastlines, canals. Where there's a coast, the shoreline becomes the cutline, so the piece takes the shape of the land.
Every footprint in the box. Use Min Building Size to drop sheds and garages before they clog the engrave.
Contour lines on the laser, real terrain on the print. Three credits, and slower to generate.
Everything is set in real-world units, so what you type is what comes off the machine. Set the finished size first, then the widths.
| Setting | Range | What it controls |
|---|---|---|
| Map size | 1–20″ | The finished square, edge to edge. Match it to your blank before anything else. |
| Line width | 1–20 mm | Base width for roads and building hairlines. Road types scale off this — motorways run about 3×. |
| Water stroke | 1–30 mm | Rivers and canals drawn as lines rather than filled shapes. |
| Frame width | 5–100 mm | Optional border with its own inner and outer cut lines and 2 mm rounded corners. |
Thin lines on thick stock burn through. If a preview looks right but the cut falls apart, widen the base line before you touch anything else.
One generate produces every file for the mode you picked. Nothing is held back for a higher tier.
Grouped layers, editable in Illustrator or Inkscape, and the file LightBurn and Glowforge read happily.
Cut, score and engrave on separate colour-mapped layers, so xTool Creative Space assigns the passes the moment it opens.
A 2 mm base plate with raised roads and buildings and recessed water, split into objects your slicer can assign filaments to.
Every job also ships an attribution file. Copy it into your listing and you're covered.
If the preview looks like a scribble, or the cut takes forty minutes, these five settings are what you reach for.
| Setting | Try | Because |
|---|---|---|
| Simplify tolerance | 0.5–2 m | Smooths jitter without losing the street grid |
| Min building size | 20–50 m² | Drops sheds and garages |
| Min island size | 1,000 m² | Fills pinholes in lakes that would drop out |
| Min pond size | 5,000 m² | Removes puddles that read as specks |
| Min road gap | 10–20 m | Stops thin slivers burning through |
Shrink the box, turn elevation off, raise simplify tolerance, drop the smaller road types.
Raise every minimum-size filter, set simplify to 2–5 m, turn off footways and park paths.
Check the feature exists in the source data, lower your minimum-size filters, and make sure that layer is on.
Post the area and your settings and someone who has cut that kind of map will tell you what to change. It's where the settings advice above came from in the first place.
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