3D printed terrains

[monoRAIL]

I realize this is slightly outside the realm of traditional maps, but as these are hand-painted I thought some of you might appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into them.

Crater Lake, Oregon:




Valles Marineris, Mars:




The Hawaiian Islands:




Iceland in Winter:


Gusev Crater, Mars:


Here's what they look like straight from the 3D printer, unpainted:


I finish them with acrylics, inks and sometimes sand or resin. They're all available to download and print for free from Thingiverse: http://www.thingiverse.com/cokane/designs

[Freodin]

Nah, totally outside of the realm of traditional maps. Totally out of topic for this forum. Nothing to see here, go home!

[/end snark]

Now seriously: I guess the appropriate response to your post would be: WOW!

[darcycardinal]

Simply amazing... gives new meaning to "hands on" must be interesting to paint.

-darcycardinal

[Robulous]

Fantastic, particularly love the Valles Marineris. Your hand painting is amazing - pity they don't come out of the printer that way!

[Ilanthar]

Amazing work! The Valles Marineris one is my favourite too, I must say.

[Redrobes]

Ohh very cool. I have done some 3D terrain on my milling machine too - ill post some images if you like.

I was told from some posts on some forum a long time ago that you can use some kind of solvent to smooth out the surface of 3D printed stuff. I think it was acetone but I might be incorrect. Are the little gradient steps due to the print head resolution or the underlying DEM data being quantized to some value like integers or something ? If the latter then its possible to fix that.

I like the painting of them too. I expect its a bit too tedious / expensive to do them and sell them for miniatures gaming terrain.

[Josiah VE]

That is... awesome! I love it! The Crater Lake one is my favorite.
Redrobes, I was also thinking of miniture gaming terrain. It would be really awesome to play on
Out of curiosity how do you get the heightmaps for the terrain?

I'd love to see more of this!

[gtwucla]

The overhead view of the Hawaiian islands and the water effect is crazy cool.

[arsheesh]

These are great! Thanks for sharing.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[Sanderling]

This is just outstandingly cool. As others have mentioned, the Valles Marineris is truly spectacular, although I love the rich color of the water in Crater Lake as well.

How do you process the DEM data for use by the 3D printer? Can you give it the raw data, set the scale and then let it do its thing? Or are there a number of steps in between?

And if someone has DEM data but no 3D printer, where can they find access to one?