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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:

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:

And the raw print:

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

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