r/vibecoding • u/Public_Reality_4401 • 1d ago
Showcase/Project Mini Skyline - 150k Users - 3D Print Any Place! Made With Claude Over 5 Months, 250 Billion Tokens
Good Morning r/vibecoding!
I'm Joey, the developer of Miniskyline! The site lets anybody select an area on a selection of planets/bodies and produce a clean, multicolor 3D printable output.
It was coded ENTIRELY with AI, the vast majority of that being on Claude Code.
How did I launch? I launched expecting it to stay small and a hobby project, but here I am four months later. Snapmaker has provided me with money due to winning in the Innovation Fund, and I have over 2000 daily unique users with over 300,000 generations since launching! I expect a few hundred a YEAR, not an hour, but here we are. It started as me rendering users requested tiles and the file being sent. Now users are treated as thick clients and they render the tiles themselves!
How did I get users? Posts on reddit as well as a lucky break when the main long standing site in this niche was taken down. They re-directed to me as their top option and it has picked up ever since. A youtuber, Uncle Jessy, worked with me and made a video that did excellent in the 3D printing space and brought over 20,000 people in just 2 days to the site.
How do I pay for it? The site is hosted via static pages on Cloudflare. I typically have less than $50/month in fees. MY largest cost is AI, which I use 3 20x plans. The donations I receive have largely paid for my development, andthe Snapmaker fund will continue covering expenses for a few more months while I get income to be steadier.
How much time did it take? All of it. Every moment I wasnt at my job, I was working on the site. AI cant just spit out something this complex in one shot. Hundreds of issue reports, hundreds of feature requests and ideas all get handled within a few hours of receipt. It is time consuming, but getting to work with the people using the site has been my favorite part.
What can you do on the site?
- Print anywhere on Earth, the moon, mars, mercury, vesta, ceres and venus!
- Changes literally hundreds of settings to tweak it to your liking
- Full 3D modelling toolkit built in so you dont have to mess around in slicer to change how something looks.
- Full multicolor support for AMS style and toolchanger style printers
- Print to puzzle, keychain and or multi tile splits!
- Over 3500 landmarks have been modelled and added to the site.
- Rigorous testing to ensure there is little to no non manifold geometry in your exports
- Extremely attention to maintaining small file sizes to allow slicers to work with your tiles more easily.
- Commercial rights ship with each bundle. You dont need a commercial license.
- Print a frame with text either as part of the model, or print the frame separate and use mechanical connections to tie it all together!
- A lot, lot more. Over 78 updates since launch. Nearly 60 hours a week working on the site outside of my career, there is a lot to do!
I hope you all enjoy! Let me know if you have any questions on development processes.
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u/Expensive-Work7716 1d ago
What made you start this? I wasn't able to understand the usecase 😅
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u/Public_Reality_4401 1d ago
Hey there! Lots of people in the 3D printing space enjoy cartography and map making! I personally wanted to print out my old college campus.
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u/MaqeSweden 1d ago
Really cool! What was the most difficult thing in the project?
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u/Public_Reality_4401 1d ago
Definitely testing. Planet scale projects have a lot of issues with random geometry that doesnt play nice with the render engine. Literal hundreds of iterations to handle every reported case. Getting there! I only get 1 or two land issue emails a week.
Next would likely be getting everything water tight across all feature combinations.
Thanks for taking an interest!
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u/Objective-Week275 1d ago
How’s it work for mountains where I want to capture the topology between a canyon and a peak
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u/Public_Reality_4401 1d ago
Im not certain if I understand your question! If you select an area with both a canyon and a mountain, they will be represented as they are in real life. It will just be a very tall print!
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u/cheibergermp 8h ago
Looks great. Where are you sourcing the data, especially the buildings and other built structures?
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u/alphagatorsoup 1d ago
Amazing, I have a family member who I think would LOVE a print of the topology of their farm.
Thank you!
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u/Public_Reality_4401 1d ago
Thanks so much for the kind words! You'll have to share how it turns out!
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u/AceHighness 1d ago
very cool stuff !!! innovative
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u/Public_Reality_4401 1d ago
Thanks for checking it out! Any requests?
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u/AceHighness 15h ago
maybe its in there already but I couldnt find it ... the city I wanted to cut has all the roads tilted, so it doesnt fit in the cutout neatly. not sure how to rotate the selection. tried the connect the dots (freeform) tool and I couldn't figure it out, it keeps wanting to add more dots, there is no clear way to say end selection ?
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u/ItsFlybye 1d ago
Pretty amazing to see your vision come alive. Bravo! I do hope this opens up to monetized adventures.
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u/migorovsky 1d ago
I tried it, it has problems creating large buildings in different cross section than plain rectangle. It varies height of the building parts very aggressively
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u/resetskillpoints 15h ago
One of the coolest things i've seen posted here. You could for sure charge for this
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u/zeeshan_here10 2h ago
The "hundreds of iterations per reported case" part is where a small regression suite pays off. Every time a user reports a broken tile, save that exact area and settings as a fixed test case. Then have a script that re-exports all saved cases after each update and checks each mesh is watertight and has no non-manifold edges (trimesh in Python can do this in a few lines). With 78 updates so far, that stops an old fix from quietly breaking again, and it covers the feature-combination problem over time without you testing by hand.
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u/robkillian 1d ago
That's an awesome project. Congratulations!! Mobile website needs a little optimization. Definitely going to be using this.