Posts Tagged ‘ topographical map

CNC The Bay

I bought & assembled my X-Carve cnc during Christmas, 2015.  Ever since then, I thought it would be perfect to do topo maps.  I had great success with Denali & Lake Tahoe, but always wanted to do something bigger.  In fact, a year before the X-Carve’s arrival, I’d 3d printed the (lower half) of the San Franisco Bay Area, which I felt turned out well.

Some friends and I took a trip to Firewood Farms in Half Moon Bay, where I picked up a couple slabs of redwood, without really knowing what I was going to do with them at the time.  Then the stars aligned, and I realized one was the perfect shape to do a cnc topo map of the whole bay area.  “The Bay” is the result:

uberbay_final_web

uberbay_persp_web

uberbay_closeup_web

More pics below.

Info on it:

  • The piece measures 17×30″, and about 1.75″ deep.
  • Rough cut was 3h, 10min.  Finish pass was 6h, 20min.   Total was 9.5h (my whole Saturday…).
  • Used a 3-flute .25″ ballnose for both passes, DeWalt router on speed 1.
  • Roughcut feed for X/Y was at 150″/min, finish pass was at 210″/min.
  • Roughcut feed for Z was 20″/min, finish pass was 40″/min : I had to modify my firmware to get these speeds.  I tried a faster z-feed, but the machine couldn’t raise the spindle that fast, and chaos ensued.
  • Very little sanding was needed, based on the 10% stepover during the finish pass.
  • Used terrain2stl to get the topo data.
  • Used Autodesk Maya for all the mesh modification, and text creation.
  • Used MeshCAM for the toolpath generation.
  • Used Universal GcodeSender to send the cam to the machine.
  • Applied a ‘natural’ Minwax stain, and “Blue Lagoon” satin paint.

Issues:

  • I think the poor Arduino Uno couldn’t handle the fast feedrate during the rough terrain parts:  The whole thing would start & stop over and over (giving me an anxiety attack at first), while the buffer caught up with the operations.  Maybe it’s time to get some new electronics?  That really slowed down the finish pass.  Didn’t have any trouble during the rough.
  • I think I could speed up the rough-cut even more by not using MeshCAM’s ‘Use 3D Roughing’ option : while it makes a nice looking roughcut, who cares, it’s all getting cut out anyway.  The result was a lot of small up/down z-travels, that really slowed it down overall.

Here’s a series of photos showing the process:

A shot in Maya, while I got the text arranged:

uberbay_maya_web

1.15 million triangles:

uberbay_maya_polydensity_web

The very first cuts:

uberbay_initialcut_web

Roughcut complete:

uberbay_roughcut_web

The final piece, before stain and paint:

uberbay_unpainted_web

In conclusion, I found this to be really satisfying project, and it looks great hanging on my living-room wall.

 

New 3D Print: Oahu 2.0

I was recently commissioned to re-3d-print my Oahu design from a year and a half ago.  Since then I’ve built a bigger printer (the C-Bot), the terrain2stl software has been improved, I’ve gotten better at painting maps, and I built an X-Carve CNC.  I’m quite pleased with the end results:

oahu_final_sm

Stats:

  • 3D printed in Makergeeks ‘Nuclear Green’ and ‘Soulful Blue’ PLA.  I paused the print and swapped filament to change from water to land.
  • From tip to tip, the 3d printed part is close to 14″ across.
  • Sliced in Simpilfy3D:  At 200 micron and 90mm\sec with a .4mm nozzle, it took around 7 hours to print.
  • Modeling for both the map and the blue acrylic was done in Autodesk Maya.
  • Terrain was captured via terrain2stl.
  • The blue acrylic was cut on my X-Carve CNC, toolpath generated by Easel, took maybe 10 minutes.
  • After print, I sponged on dark green spray-paint, and after drying, light brown on the mountain tops.
  • The models height is scaled up 2x to exaggerate the terrain.

Another angle:

oahu_perspective_sm

And the raw print:

oahu_unpainted_sm

If this is something you’d like in your home (or any other map) let me know and we can work something out.

New 3D Print: Maui

I’ve 3d printed a few other maps, and got a lot of enjoyment out of it:

I recently spent a week in Maui:  This gave me inspiration to do a (painted) 3d print of it on my C-Bot:

maui_painted_main

The below post is an overview of how I designed, printed, and painted it.


Getting the Mesh Data

I first headed to the web app Terrain2STL : This is the great little program that lets you download 3d-printable terrain data.

However, no matter what you set the capture-box size to, it captures the same resolution of data.  If you make the box the size of the whole island of Maui, you end up with a pretty low-resolution capture mesh, based on the detail I want to 3d print.  So the only way to get a ‘high-res’ Maui mesh is to download many small chunks, that will later be seamed together to build a high-res island.

In Terrain2STL, I set the box size (ARC seconds) to 360.  Based on that size, I can adjust the latitude & longitude values by .1 values, to offset the box by one length in either direction.  So stating at the NW corner of Maui, I started capturing squares of it’s mesh.  In total, I made 30 captures.

Assembling the Mesh Data

In Autodesk Maya, I created a new scene, and started importing in each STL that Terrain2STL generated.  Starting in the NW corner, I’d import in the next stl, line it up with the last, and repeat that process.  Which gave me something that looked like this upon completion:

maui_maya_chunks_raw

I then went through the process of deleting all the mesh that wasn’t part of the island, stretching all the edges down to make a cliff-like effect, making a base for it, and creating the text.  I also did a lot of mesh cleanup since the Terrain2STL tool isn’t perfect.  Final Maya result:

maui_maya_final

tried to boolean all the mesh together, but Maya just wouldn’t do it.  This left me frustrated, but I realized that Simplify3D (the slicer I use) allows you to import in multiple mesh:  In Maya, I made sure the pivots of all the mesh were at the origin (so they’d all show up in Simplify3D in the correct location), the transformations frozen, and I exported every individual piece as a new STL.

Slicing The Data

I imported all the stl’s into Simplify3D:  They appeared to all line up correctly.  I wanted the island to be scaled 2x on the Z axis, so I grouped all that mesh, and applied the scale transformation.

But when I sliced it, I noticed lots of little gaps between the mesh chunks:

maui_sliced

Come to find out, even though all the mesh was lined up correctly, in some cases… it just wasn’t enough for Simplify3D : This spawned a painful process of me moving pieces, re-slicing, checking gaps, etc.  But eventually I got rid of them all.  The general prints stats were:

  • 200 micron, .4mm E3D-v6 Volcano nozzle
  • Maker Geeks Gray’matter Gray PLA @ @210 deg.  Bed @ 50 deg.
  • 90 mm\sec print speed.
  • 2 shells, 4 roof\floor. 10% ‘fast hexagonal’ infill.

Took around 13 hours to complete.  Based on my 12″x12″ build platform, printed diagonally it came out to 14″ across:

maui_noPaint

Painting the model

I wanted to try a new (for me) dry-brush technique to show off the mountains.

To start, I shot the whole model in a pleasing Rust-Oleum ‘Meadow Green’ color:

maui_midPaint

After that dried, I sprayed “Maui Blue” (can’t believe I found a color that matches the medium I’m painting) onto a foam brush, and painted up the ocean.  Finally, I sprayed a light-brown onto a paper towel, and then brushed it across the mountain peaks for the final result.

maui_painted_NW maui_painted_SW

Was really pleased with the results!

New 3d Print: Oahu

After making my SF Bay print, I thought I’d turn to the Hawaiian islands: I lived on Oahu for a time and have many fond memories. I was always shocked by its beauty constrained by size: I’m pretty sure you could drive around it twice in one day if you tried.  Printed on my Makerbot Replicator (1) .  Download the files to print over on Thingiverse.

I’ve covered in detail the process I used to make these maps.  But below are tweaks I made this time:

  • I printed the ocean much thicker:  The bay print was 2 layers (.4mm) but this just seemed too delicate.  The oceans for this were 8 layers (1.6mm).
  • I had issues with the corners of the bay print lifting during print.  For Oahu, I set my build platform to 50 degs:  This printed them completely flat, with no warping.
  • The stl’s that Terrain2STL generated had some pretty big holes in them:  Mainly along the sheer cliffs that Oahu has.  I’m guessing this is data that couldn’t be captured successfully from space.  Unfortunately these were bigger holes than Meshlab could cleanup successfully.  Luckily, running them through Microsoft’s “Model Repair Service” (used to be Netfabb Cloud) fix each one up nicely.

Check out the article written on it at 3DPrint.com

New 3d print: Print The Bay

This is a print of the San Francisco bay area I made based on the fantastic tool by Thatcher Chamberlin, Terrain2STL. I used Meshlab for cleanup of holes, and scaling operations.

I epoxied each of the four regions to a custom piece of light blue acrylic acquired fromTAP Plastics.

Get more info and download the files to print yourself over on Thingiverse.

To see a detailed overview the process I used to make them, check my pose here.

Check out the article written on it at 3dPrint.com.