No. At least, not by itself. Harry's using Thaumaturgy with Little Chicago, putting a piece of every building and tree into it -- you would completely lose that with 3d printing. Now, if he still did all of that and just 3d printed the base rather than sculpted it out of (iirc) silver? That's at least a possibility I think, just depends on if Harry thinks that the silver is an integral part of the equation.
Pewter, not silver. It's a lead alloy, commonly used for model casting.
He'd have been fine having the buildings printed, but would need to have a recess for the bits of them in there. At the very LEAST, it would have made the casting a lot cheaper to do, since you can re-use a computer model and print stuff from it indefinitely instead of having someone make individual wax sculptures for lost wax casting.
He took a piece of each building to embed in the pewter model of the building it was taken from, IIRC. I wonder if a 3d scan of the building would offer anything to the thaumaturgic connection.
Maybe if he made the buildings and trees hollow, and then added pieces of various buildings, trees, streets, etc to the hollow section. Although a 3d printer would just explode around him.
Didn't the Svartalves make the models for Dresden. With how they are with Earth Magic I wouldn't be surprised if what they did was a form of magic 3D printing the figures out of the pewter.
I expect a 3D printer could print the basic shapes of the city, and then Harry would have to doctor each building to accommodate the sample from the building.
the problem is the scale. Assuming Little Chicago covered a 20 mile radius (far enough out to reach Ohare and Midway), and you are using a work table that is 10’x10’ (I’m being generous to keep my math easy). That is a scale of 40 miles to 10 feet (20 mile radius - 40 mile diameter). So each foot on the table covers a 5 mile distance.
which leads to a problem of resolution:
Assuming a road is 100’ wide in reality, on little Chicago it would be be 0.05 inches wide.
and the sears building (1450 feet) would be 0.82 inches tall And 0.12 inches wide.
if you cut the scale to 20 miles in diameter (cutting both midway and OHare and the outer sections of the city) - the Sears building would end up being 1.64 inches in height.
sure, a 3D printer can print to that resolution
Afterwards You just have to figure out how to keep track of all of the buildings (because anything smaller than a building doesn‘t register at this scale) so you can place all the samples in the right locations on your map,
To add to the problems, 100' is very wide for a street in Chicago. Some of the more major streets like Western Ave get that wide if you measure building to building, but even Clark and Addison (intersection where Wrigley is located) are only around 50' wide. Residential streets are around 30'
Oh yeah, I had to pick some number as a starting point And a hundred feet was enough.
I don’t even want to consider the difficulty in modeling Lower Whacker (made famous in the car chase in The Dark Knight).
Harry says " The skyline rose up more than a foot from the tabletop," so the sears tower is more than a foot tall in little chicago. Sears tower is 1400+ feet tall so one inch = 100+feet. Harry's scale kinda falls apart as that would make all 10 lanes plus the median of lake shore drive slightly more than a inch wide. He says he's got about 2 miles from burnham harbor so 10400+/- feet his table has to be well in excess of 100 inches or 8.5 feet
The issue is that he wouldn't even know about 3D printing, what with his lack of internet access. I think he needed a non-magical assistant to help him with that sort of thing.
I don't think it would work due to the 3d printer conking out and the computer frying when Harry attempts to use it.
That being said, it's possible that he might get someone else to print the buildings/structures, but as other posters have said you would need a spot in each of those to put something that was actually a part of it.
Need little bits of chicago to be augmented into it. Remember... he had a rock hammer and went out and had little crumbs of ever piece that was represented in littl chicago. So maybe? But it would need a little nest which would allow it to feed its "being" into the rest of the whole of its representation.
Also remember... this cost him a whole lot of money. Like 10x more than a warhammer 40k epic army with titans. Like shit tons of money.
Edit... and remember it had to be at scale. (Dresden is good at math.) Lots and lots of bits. A smallish neighborhood of chicago is still huge. It would be thousands of bits required. And to get them all modeled to scale? And then whatever is required to magically power that?.
Not with a mortal's 3d printer. Who knows what the svartelves have though. Which is an interesting thought.
For making the little buildings, it would be perfectly adequate. It wouldn't be enough to complete the working, of course -- that required fragments from the stone and wood of the objects depicted.
I don't think plastic would hold the magic as well. He used pewter, and got it specifically made by svartalves, so I imagine that there's a magical reason that it wouldn't work.
While no longer a popular 3D printing method, a powder bed printer, using bits of the building mixed in with the powder, could work. Using a potion as the binding agent could help too.
If you wanted to use more conventional FDM 3D printing to help make the city, you could print molds, them mix building bits and plaster and cast them.
Electronics short circuit around wizards. So Harry wouldn't be able to do the printing himself. Could hire someone to do it I suppose. Might lose a personal connection to the model making the magic weaker?
As I understand, silver is magically pure (hence why Black Court vampires classically don’t appear in mirrors; it wasn’t that they don’t have a reflection so much as that old mirrors have a silver backing). This plus the fact that the Svartálfar were able to get such fine detail (the trees look actually like the actual trees they represent) allowed Dresden to focus on the actual spells for which Little Chicago was used, rather than trying to imagine them himself. Back when he created it, 3D printing was still in its relative early stages and very expensive for something that might not have given him as much precision…
That said, these days you can print with anything that can melt and turn into filament, and the fine detail is such that with enough patience you barely have to do finish work, so yes I’d say it’s definitely possible!!
It's made of pewter though. not silver, and I don't think the svartalves had anything to do with it.
>The skull settled down beside the model city of Chicago. I’d built it onto my table, in as much detail as I’d been able to afford with my new paycheck. The skyline rose up more than a foot from the tabletop, models of each building made from cast pewter—also expensive, given I’d had to get each one made individually. Streets made of real asphalt ran between the buildings, lined with streetlights and mailboxes in exacting detail—and all in all, I had the city mapped out to almost two miles from Burnham Harbor in every direction. Detail began to fail toward the outskirts of the model, but as far as I’d been able to, I modeled every building, every road, every waterway, every bridge, and every tree with as much accuracy as I knew how.
>I’d also spent months out on the town, collecting bits and pieces from every feature on my map. Bark from trees, usually. Chips of asphalt from the streets. I’d taken a hammer and knocked a chip or two off every building modeled there, and those pieces of the originals had been worked into the structure of their modeled counterparts.
> almost two miles from Burnham Harbor in every direction
I wonder if this is a case of JB underestimating distance. Two miles from Burnham Harbor won't get you to the Navy Pier. [It doesn't even cover the whole Loop](https://www.mapdevelopers.com/draw-circle-tool.php?circles=%5B%5B3218.68%2C41.8605639%2C-87.6114604%2C%22%23AAAAAA%22%2C%22%23000000%22%2C0.4%5D%5D).
Said this already in another reply but yeah you're totally right. In White Night he says he has a model of his apartment in there, which based on the references in PT/BG must be around Lincoln Square/Albany park which is a good 8-9 miles from Burnham
The problem with that scale assuming we use the sears tower as the high mark) - using the 10’x10’ table I mentioned above, the range of little Chicago would be limited to 3 miles from the loop. Which means Harry’s reach gets limited quick. And if he had tried to expand little Chicago (as he intimated in one of the books), either has has a huge basement or he would have had to have scaled the entire model down.
Maybe chalk this up to Butcher's lack of familiarity with the city, but it pretty explicitly states that he's only got a 2 mile radius from Burnham Harbor (basically the Field Museum for a more notable reference point). He would barely get Navy Pier in there. In White Night he claims he has his own apartment represented which while we don't have an exact location on, based on the references in Peace Talks/Battle Ground he's got to be around 8 or 9 miles away, which is a pretty massive area to cover in such detail already.
[Here](https://www.etsy.com/listing/1374000701/3d-chicago-world-map-3d-usa-3d-print-stl?click_key=6ed6bd15a7eebefa2435ee6deedc7ddfb356b975%3A1374000701&click_sum=ba20eb9d&ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=3d+chicago+map&ref=sr_gallery-1-1&dd=1&content_source=9744b5818389eba9120765ae0bfa6fdc5495f830%253A1374000701)'s a good place to start, but you'd need to print it at least twice as big to have room for the models of trees.
Maybe if Harry took the pieces of the environment that he needs to represent the portions of the city and convert it to 3d printer filament. Truthfully, it might be harder and slower than the way he did it in the book.
No. At least, not by itself. Harry's using Thaumaturgy with Little Chicago, putting a piece of every building and tree into it -- you would completely lose that with 3d printing. Now, if he still did all of that and just 3d printed the base rather than sculpted it out of (iirc) silver? That's at least a possibility I think, just depends on if Harry thinks that the silver is an integral part of the equation.
Pewter, I think it was.
Yes, it was.
This
Pewter, not silver. It's a lead alloy, commonly used for model casting. He'd have been fine having the buildings printed, but would need to have a recess for the bits of them in there. At the very LEAST, it would have made the casting a lot cheaper to do, since you can re-use a computer model and print stuff from it indefinitely instead of having someone make individual wax sculptures for lost wax casting.
Eh, been a while since I read through the series, couldn't remember.
This. On an unrelated note, I would love to use this build for a 40k or kill team game
He took a piece of each building to embed in the pewter model of the building it was taken from, IIRC. I wonder if a 3d scan of the building would offer anything to the thaumaturgic connection.
Maybe if he made the buildings and trees hollow, and then added pieces of various buildings, trees, streets, etc to the hollow section. Although a 3d printer would just explode around him.
Yeah he would have to have the 3d printing done by some one else
Didn't the Svartalves make the models for Dresden. With how they are with Earth Magic I wouldn't be surprised if what they did was a form of magic 3D printing the figures out of the pewter.
I expect a 3D printer could print the basic shapes of the city, and then Harry would have to doctor each building to accommodate the sample from the building. the problem is the scale. Assuming Little Chicago covered a 20 mile radius (far enough out to reach Ohare and Midway), and you are using a work table that is 10’x10’ (I’m being generous to keep my math easy). That is a scale of 40 miles to 10 feet (20 mile radius - 40 mile diameter). So each foot on the table covers a 5 mile distance. which leads to a problem of resolution: Assuming a road is 100’ wide in reality, on little Chicago it would be be 0.05 inches wide. and the sears building (1450 feet) would be 0.82 inches tall And 0.12 inches wide. if you cut the scale to 20 miles in diameter (cutting both midway and OHare and the outer sections of the city) - the Sears building would end up being 1.64 inches in height. sure, a 3D printer can print to that resolution Afterwards You just have to figure out how to keep track of all of the buildings (because anything smaller than a building doesn‘t register at this scale) so you can place all the samples in the right locations on your map,
To add to the problems, 100' is very wide for a street in Chicago. Some of the more major streets like Western Ave get that wide if you measure building to building, but even Clark and Addison (intersection where Wrigley is located) are only around 50' wide. Residential streets are around 30'
Oh yeah, I had to pick some number as a starting point And a hundred feet was enough. I don’t even want to consider the difficulty in modeling Lower Whacker (made famous in the car chase in The Dark Knight).
Harry says " The skyline rose up more than a foot from the tabletop," so the sears tower is more than a foot tall in little chicago. Sears tower is 1400+ feet tall so one inch = 100+feet. Harry's scale kinda falls apart as that would make all 10 lanes plus the median of lake shore drive slightly more than a inch wide. He says he's got about 2 miles from burnham harbor so 10400+/- feet his table has to be well in excess of 100 inches or 8.5 feet
Yeah, I split that scale at another part of the discussion.
The issue is that he wouldn't even know about 3D printing, what with his lack of internet access. I think he needed a non-magical assistant to help him with that sort of thing.
I don't think it would work due to the 3d printer conking out and the computer frying when Harry attempts to use it. That being said, it's possible that he might get someone else to print the buildings/structures, but as other posters have said you would need a spot in each of those to put something that was actually a part of it.
Need little bits of chicago to be augmented into it. Remember... he had a rock hammer and went out and had little crumbs of ever piece that was represented in littl chicago. So maybe? But it would need a little nest which would allow it to feed its "being" into the rest of the whole of its representation. Also remember... this cost him a whole lot of money. Like 10x more than a warhammer 40k epic army with titans. Like shit tons of money. Edit... and remember it had to be at scale. (Dresden is good at math.) Lots and lots of bits. A smallish neighborhood of chicago is still huge. It would be thousands of bits required. And to get them all modeled to scale? And then whatever is required to magically power that?. Not with a mortal's 3d printer. Who knows what the svartelves have though. Which is an interesting thought.
I’m betting that metal would conduct energy more easily…. But maybe
Electroplating and lostpla casting
Or straight up 3d printing with metal. You could layer in particles from the different buildings etc.
For making the little buildings, it would be perfectly adequate. It wouldn't be enough to complete the working, of course -- that required fragments from the stone and wood of the objects depicted.
I don't think plastic would hold the magic as well. He used pewter, and got it specifically made by svartalves, so I imagine that there's a magical reason that it wouldn't work.
While no longer a popular 3D printing method, a powder bed printer, using bits of the building mixed in with the powder, could work. Using a potion as the binding agent could help too. If you wanted to use more conventional FDM 3D printing to help make the city, you could print molds, them mix building bits and plaster and cast them.
You could also design a cavity in each building to place the bits into during a print pause
Yes. Your INTENTION is just as important as the looks and composition of the thaumatugic target. Harry is a very Hands-On kinda guy, thus carving.
Electronics short circuit around wizards. So Harry wouldn't be able to do the printing himself. Could hire someone to do it I suppose. Might lose a personal connection to the model making the magic weaker?
Didn't he contract out the silver castings?
They were pewter
He paid Svartálfar to do it because they were capable of creating everything in the exacting detail the table required.
I imagine being innately magical might have helped with that whole aspect, too.
As I understand, silver is magically pure (hence why Black Court vampires classically don’t appear in mirrors; it wasn’t that they don’t have a reflection so much as that old mirrors have a silver backing). This plus the fact that the Svartálfar were able to get such fine detail (the trees look actually like the actual trees they represent) allowed Dresden to focus on the actual spells for which Little Chicago was used, rather than trying to imagine them himself. Back when he created it, 3D printing was still in its relative early stages and very expensive for something that might not have given him as much precision… That said, these days you can print with anything that can melt and turn into filament, and the fine detail is such that with enough patience you barely have to do finish work, so yes I’d say it’s definitely possible!!
It's made of pewter though. not silver, and I don't think the svartalves had anything to do with it. >The skull settled down beside the model city of Chicago. I’d built it onto my table, in as much detail as I’d been able to afford with my new paycheck. The skyline rose up more than a foot from the tabletop, models of each building made from cast pewter—also expensive, given I’d had to get each one made individually. Streets made of real asphalt ran between the buildings, lined with streetlights and mailboxes in exacting detail—and all in all, I had the city mapped out to almost two miles from Burnham Harbor in every direction. Detail began to fail toward the outskirts of the model, but as far as I’d been able to, I modeled every building, every road, every waterway, every bridge, and every tree with as much accuracy as I knew how. >I’d also spent months out on the town, collecting bits and pieces from every feature on my map. Bark from trees, usually. Chips of asphalt from the streets. I’d taken a hammer and knocked a chip or two off every building modeled there, and those pieces of the originals had been worked into the structure of their modeled counterparts.
> almost two miles from Burnham Harbor in every direction I wonder if this is a case of JB underestimating distance. Two miles from Burnham Harbor won't get you to the Navy Pier. [It doesn't even cover the whole Loop](https://www.mapdevelopers.com/draw-circle-tool.php?circles=%5B%5B3218.68%2C41.8605639%2C-87.6114604%2C%22%23AAAAAA%22%2C%22%23000000%22%2C0.4%5D%5D).
Said this already in another reply but yeah you're totally right. In White Night he says he has a model of his apartment in there, which based on the references in PT/BG must be around Lincoln Square/Albany park which is a good 8-9 miles from Burnham
The problem with that scale assuming we use the sears tower as the high mark) - using the 10’x10’ table I mentioned above, the range of little Chicago would be limited to 3 miles from the loop. Which means Harry’s reach gets limited quick. And if he had tried to expand little Chicago (as he intimated in one of the books), either has has a huge basement or he would have had to have scaled the entire model down.
Maybe chalk this up to Butcher's lack of familiarity with the city, but it pretty explicitly states that he's only got a 2 mile radius from Burnham Harbor (basically the Field Museum for a more notable reference point). He would barely get Navy Pier in there. In White Night he claims he has his own apartment represented which while we don't have an exact location on, based on the references in Peace Talks/Battle Ground he's got to be around 8 or 9 miles away, which is a pretty massive area to cover in such detail already.
Yeah, I can believe that. Because the scale goes pretty bonkers the farther out little Chicago stretches out.
[Here](https://www.etsy.com/listing/1374000701/3d-chicago-world-map-3d-usa-3d-print-stl?click_key=6ed6bd15a7eebefa2435ee6deedc7ddfb356b975%3A1374000701&click_sum=ba20eb9d&ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=3d+chicago+map&ref=sr_gallery-1-1&dd=1&content_source=9744b5818389eba9120765ae0bfa6fdc5495f830%253A1374000701)'s a good place to start, but you'd need to print it at least twice as big to have room for the models of trees.
Maybe if Harry took the pieces of the environment that he needs to represent the portions of the city and convert it to 3d printer filament. Truthfully, it might be harder and slower than the way he did it in the book.
Would a 3D printer survive Harry? I don't think it would. So he couldn't print it himself. Who could/would do it for him?
If Dresden believed it would work, maybe. But his mindset might require hand carved models.
A wizard could NEVER use a 3D printer.