3D printing terrain maps

[npaden]

Just doing topo lines and a single color is very easy. The difficult part is when the lines cross. Like a topo line crossing the property boundary line or a road. The software to choose the color is manual and you have to "fill" the line. If another line intersects it then the fill stops. If you fill the boundary lines and roads first it works pretty well but then when you add the topo lines you have them going across the property line and the roads. I manually went back and tried to color in the property lines and roads after I did the topo lines but that was a pain and you can see that I didn't get them all fixed. The blender file was massive and then the 3d print file was gigantic and liked to sit and think and crash alot. If I were to do it again I might just leave the property lines and roads with topo contours going through them.

 

[Addicting]

This is very cool. I’m a huge map geek. How big is the property in your first map? Trying to picture what some of my favorite drainages would like.

These could be a great selling tool in your line of work.

 

[It’s Bucky]

What is your son going to charge? And will you keep secret spots a secret? Lol

 

[npaden]

I never could get him interested enough to do it, and it took way longer than I was going to be willing to spend on it.

The simple 3D single color ones are relatively easy and adding contour lines is pretty easy, it's once you start adding the property lines and roads and all that fun stuff that it starts to get complicated and time consuming. Even at a reasonable hourly rate for him it was going to end up costing more than I think people would be willing to pay for the full blown detail versions.

I've thought about going back and doing it on a larger scale where you essentially print it out in sections and then put them together after it is printed but never got around to it.

I do have a newer computer now that would probably not bog down as badly working in Blender. It is a VERY big resource hog and some of the stuff I was doing would take 30 minutes to process sometimes.

 

[PoleX]

If you search this in youtube there is a video on hydro dipping 3D printed parts. I'm not sure how it would translate on the contour maps in terms of scale, but it might be worth trying. If you could figure out a rough scaling, it seems like i'd look really nice and be a lot faster. I don't know anything about hydro dipping, just a quick thought that came to mind.

 

[Nick87]

Are yout taking orders?

 

[jwatts]

I've carved a few terrain reliefs on my cnc from ash wood. There's a new site called Topomiller that's supposed to be easy to obtain the stl file for the area you want to carve or print.

 

[Rack Daniels]

We upgraded our 3D printer to one that can print multiple colors and I’ve done some learning on stuff like LiDAR maps, QGIS, Blender, GPX extruder and converters and fun stuff like that and am pretty happy with the end result.

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This is our property in Colorado.

Contour lines are at 100’ increments. I did double thickness on the contour lines at 6,500' and 7,000'. Had a little mess up that made the 6,900' line a little thicker too but it was going to be too much work to fix so I left it a little bit thicker too. Black is the property boundary, yellow is BLM, then light color is either clearing or cliffs, I tried to pretty much take a topo maps and render it in 3D. Brown is roads, the main roads are a little wider and the trails are smaller and some of those ended up with some gaps but I think that emphasizes that they are trails and not roads.

It took the printer 35 hours and 861 color changes to print it. It probably took me almost that many to figure everything out and get it ready to print.

Now that I know how to do it I’m hoping I can help my 17 year old son leverage that into a side gig making these for other people. I think another market for them might be for hikers or trail runners who want an overlay of their GPS path placed over a terrain map.

The LiDAR stuff is pretty amazing, I saw things on the LiDAR map that I hadn’t noticed on my own property even looking at it in person. The 3D printer isn’t quite precise enough to get everything to show up that you can see on a computer screen but it does a decent job. For sure better than just a Google Earth terrain map.

Oh well, thought I would share.

Nathan

That is super cool!
You own a whole mountain?!? DAaAaanGg!!
Lol Ted got a little brother named Nate?

 

[BuckRut]

They definitely become time consuming. I have dug into these a bit lately and like you mentioned some modifications are pretty straight forward and others take so much time that nobody would pay a reasonable rate for the time. Here are a few of mine.