Feature Friday No. 9 – Geographical Terrain Models

Welcome back to this week’s Feature Friday! Today we want to talk about a 3D printing topic that we discovered thanks to a very unique customer request we received about two years ago. What happened was that a the son of a recently retired man asked us if we could print a 3D model of the road his father took for over 30 years in order to go to work and home again.

Geographical terrain models were completely new ground for us but since we simply love challenging projects and we admired the client’s determination, we accepted the inquiry and started with doing research on the topic.

How we tackled the project

The first thing we found out was that the globe is in fact surprisingly flat and it is not as simple as just taking satellite height data from Viewfinder panoramas. For this reason we got in touch with the expert for 3D geographical maps – Gregor Lütolf. He is an author and one of the two main contributors to the platform 3drucken.ch. Especially his article “How to generate printable 3D geographical maps” was a great guideline and help with extruding the landscape so that the features could be recognized.

Following Gregor Lütolf’s article and with further support from Accu Trans software we could manage to create this wonderful souvenir. Enthusiastic about the result we continued our 3D terrain model project. The Hawaiian islands as well as the Milford Sound fjord in New Zealand are examples for further landscapes we created.

Want to bring the world into your home too?

Do you, your friends or your family also have a favorite landscape which you would love to see every day? Like the Grand Canyon, the Alps, the Ayers rock or simply the mountain you have climbed? Or do you play tabletop games like e.g. Warhammer, for which you want to create unique landscapes?

With the 3D printing technology you have the freedom to create every landscape for every purpose and basically to bring the world into your home.

If you need help or have questions feel free to write, call, or visit us. We would be glad to answer all your questions.

See you next week to a new episode of our Feature Friday and have a nice weekend!