Hi, my name is Thomas and I love landscapes, data and 3D printing.
My idea
When I printed my first 3D-model of Switzerland I really enjoyed how much you can recognize from real life, and how many details are possible in a relatively small model. I had manually changed the filament colors during the print with the filament I had on hand and was surprised to find the result quite pretty to look at as well. This first print was a lot of manual work and consisted of two parts which had to be glued together. The data was also not the highest quality and the border was inaccurate in several places. So I wanted to make this process easier, and the end result even nicer and even more detailed and accurate.
My printer
Large format 3D printers with color changing ability are still not commonplace and I could not simply buy a machine which would do the job. So I had to build one from plans of an open source design group (Voron) in the largest size possible (350 mm x 350 mm) and add a color changing unit (ERCF). While the build is straightforward thanks to the efforts of the Voron team, getting the machine to run reliably for very large, detailed and thus long duration prints with color changes was a major challenge. I use the print area to the last millimeter (technically, I even exceed it), print in very thin layers (0.1 mm) and print in specially selected, environmentally friendly PLA filament, which required tuning and modifications.
My 3D models
The resulting 3D models are highly detailed, very accurate and have 5 colored layers showing the altitude regions. All the larger lakes are shown in blue.
For my first new model of Switzerland, this means:
- Size: 435 mm x 275 mm at a scale of 1:800'000
- Vertical size: 20.44 mm at a vertical scale of 1:300'000 (vertical factor 2.666)
- Horizontal resulution: better than 0.1 mm, corresponding to 80 m
- Vertical resultion: 0.1 mm, corresponding to 30 m
- Color changes every 2.5 mm, corresponding to 750 m
- 32 lakes
- 36 hours of print time