3d Printed Topographical Map

3d printing topographical maps used to be a real pain in the ass. You would have to get some program like ARC GIS and find a plugin that could export stl files and generally jump through a bunch of hoops. Today though, there are websites where you can just download an STL of an arbitrary geographic location.

For this project, I used https://touchterrain.geol.iastate.edu/main. I had to tweak the settings a little bit, to get a thick enough base height and to exaggerate the size of the mountains.

This was a gift for my sister, who went to college in Knoxville, is from Maryville, and lives in Atlanta. And it’s from me, who lives in Huntsville. So you can see that I picked out a nice section of map that includes all the important cities as well as some interesting geography.

The online tool is pretty nice. You can see here the preview of the file that it generates.

And then here is the slicer output.

Finally, here is the finished print. I ended up actually putting it in a nicer shadow box that you see below. It’s pretty impossible to see with a camera photo behind the glass, but in real life it looked awesome!