Anyone have a different method?

[Vince Laurent]

I am trying to do something like this but don't have access to 360: 

https://www.instructables.com/Easy-3D-Topographical-Maps/

My google-foo is off this Monday morning so if anyone has a different source/tool I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks

Vince 

[Chris Weiss]

isn't fusion 360 free?

[Arch Reactor, Sergeant At Arms]

Fusion 360 is free, but maybe difficult for this project.

You could hand-draw the topographical lines from above and then scan the sketch into a digital image which could be uploaded into the laser cutter and cut line by line.

On Mon, Aug 23, 2021 at 3:34 PM Chris Weiss <cwe...@gmail.com> wrote:

isn't fusion 360 free?

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[Vince Laurent]

I saw $495/year  on https://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/overview   Am I overlooking something?

[Vince Laurent]

OK.. free to hobby folks.  Just downloaded.  Will see how this goes.

[Vince Laurent]

Thanks for the replies.  I'll let you know what I end up doing.

[Ray Scheufler]

What exactly are you trying to do?  Are you trying to get a 3d model from elevation data?  Are you trying to laser cut layers to make a topographic map?  What is your source data format?

Last year I took elevation data from the state of Iowa in geotiff format and made a 3d model to be 3d printed.  Geotiff data is an image that has geospatial information associated with it.  I used QGis to load and find the area of interested and crop out the area I wanted to use.  Then I used "3D Builder" from microsoft to turn the greyscale image into a 3d model using the intensity of each pixel as the height.

If you are trying to laser cut layers, I think there are a few programs that can take a 3d STL and slice it into layers for a laser cutter.  You could also probably use inkscape's ability to trace an image and use different intensities for the different elevations.

https://inkscape.org/doc/tutorials/tracing/tutorial-tracing.html

Just some food for thought.  I might be able to dig up more notes on my exact process if you wanted to try and do something similar to what I had done.

Ray Scheufler

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