Maps of Azeroth: Eastern Kingdoms

About Me

I am a huge fan of World of Warcraft, played almost every expansion they created. On Retail , Classic, and also on private servers :)

Idea

A few months back i got the idea of printing the world map of Classic Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms so i can put the model on my wall and have that nostalgic feeling everytime I look at the piece of art!

I started digging through the vast universe of freely available models and did not find anyone who created anything like that.

So i began looking into ways of making it myself.

After a bit of research I found a tool (wow.export) which made it possible to extract models directly from the game data. I started downloading all map pieces of the Classic Map of the Eastern Kingdoms and imported them into Blender.

Disclaimer: I had zero knowledge at that time how Blender works and still think i know almost nothing of 3D modelling.

I quickly became aware that my plan of “simply” whipping something up, print it and be done with it wasn't gonna work… The map was a surface model only and I had to find a way of making it solid. Also I saw that certain parts of the Classic Map were not designed properly and just blocky and/or flat, so I decided to go with the Retail version of the map. That also meant that the map did not look anything like Classic at all. But the details were much better :) After a few weeks of trying i got to a point where I had a usable model to print.

So here is how I did it:

I scaled the whole map down to 0.0035 of its original size, removed about 90% of its original level of detail and created 2 sets of blocks. The idea was to have the map in two colors, everything below sea-level was one color and everything above sea-level was the other. The block below sea-level was 24.2667x24.2667x1.755 cm (x,y,z). 

Now I faced a new challenge… There were parts of the map which were dry land in-game but located below sea-level (think of the Un'goro Crater), and I had to lower the “sea-level” at those parts of the map. Finally, once I got everything ready, I cut the map of the Eastern Kingdoms in 6 pieces and started printing :) The biggest model took about 12h to print, while the smallest model was done in 9h. In the end I painted a slab of wood I found at home in the same color the plastic had below sea-level and glued first the pieces together with instant glue, and then used silicone glue to stick it to the wood and put it on the wall. I really like how it turned out!

Let me know what you think! :D and if you decide to print it as well, happy printing!

The map is at a scale of 1:31000 (I think) so the map after assembly is around 65-70 cm high

The map of Kalimdor: https://makerworld.com/en/models/1635618-map-of-the-lands-of-kalimdor

The map of the Maelstrom: https://makerworld.com/en/models/1635581-map-of-the-maelstrom