How to prepare XYZ bathy (text) file for 3D printing?

[RobA]

I've built my own DFF 3D printer and have played with a variety of stl programs.

Openscad can be used to intersect your surface with a cube to generate a printable stl file. It still might have to be run through something like netfabb to cleanup the stl.

Also there are mesh processing libraries for the processing.org software that could create an stl.

http://landprint.com/ is one company that provides a commercial service for land data, I assume that they could also work with your bathemetry.

If the data is a pure X/Y grid with one Z value per X/Y pair, it should be straightforward to write software to turn it into an stl file. PM me if interested.

-Rob A>



Sorry for the brevity, sent using Tapatalk...

[olalla04]

Hi Rob,

thanks for your reply. I will test Openscad asap, I'm pretty busy right now, on a survey vessel with limited web access. But anyways. I have Netfabb installed as well, so I will give it a shot.

I do not have any programming background, this might explain my hope for an easy to use solution. Still my gut feeling tells me, this should be a pretty simple task, assuming the surface is water proof already and just needs to be extruded downwards. Tracing the current border XY coords, reading out their Z, adding whatever number to each, that sums up to a target Z, create those polygons an finally close them by a bottom.

I'm a heavy user of ArcGIS (10) and was surprised they don't have a toolbox for this already ("Convert surface raster into block"), at least not within my extensions (3D Analyst and XToolsPro . I do have hopes though that, with 3D printing becoming more popular, some genious will script a toolbox that can be added. Maybe it's you?

I've seen Landprint's offer but since I'm normally based in Germany, using a german provider would be easier (and cheaper?) for me.

Thanks again,
G.