Recreating Westeros in Minecraft is awesome, but 3-D printing a Tyrion Lannister-sized model of Winterfell is epic.

The project's maker, Daniel Ammann, is the Executive Vice President of Research and Development at u-blox, a Swiss semiconductor company, but he spends his off hours pursuing geeky projects. "It was the MakerBot article in Wired which brought me to the idea of buying a 3-D printer," says Ammann. "And then time over the Christmas break, together with watching the second season of Game of Thrones and the desire to learn a CAD tool sparked this project."

The opening credits and a crudely drawn map on a wiki were all Ammann had to work with. Photo: HBO

As with any heroic quest, there were difficulties Ammann had to face while designing the project. "The biggest challenge was finding a 'true' town map," he says. "The title sequence is only a few seconds, and shows the town whilst it builds up. There is a ground map at A Wiki of Fire & Ice and you can also find various artwork that was done by fans. Interpolating between these different sources and filling in the blank was surely the challenging and fun part."

"Since I'm a complete noob in mechanical design, using the CAD tool was another challenge," he continues. Luckily, he was able to master Solidworks sufficiently to recreate the Stark stronghold and share it on Thingiverse.

Photo: BartW

With the third season of Game of Thrones starting at the end of March, Ammann is planning on tackling some of Westeros' bigger cities. "The Wall is definitely on the to-do list," he says. "The model I started with recently though is Pyke, the seat of House Greyjoy. This is the castle on top of several rocky fingers, and should give a great model. King's Landing is huge, and would leave a lot more room for interpretation — so probably something that would better be done in a community effort."

So let the word be known that Lord Ammann of House Thingiverse has called his banner men to help achieve this noble goal and help pass the time until Game of Thrones returns.