3d Printing Prospecting Area Terrain Models

[jasong]

I bought myself an early Christmas present in order to make a few specialized brackets/clamps that I didn't want to pay to get manufactured. Finishing that, I decided to print myself a desk ornament. 

And here it is complete, I just spitballed the coloration at the point the old gravels stop and meet the granites. These models are pretty useful for estimating paleo surface and drainages and whatnot if you spend the time and get more accurate with the coloring and go to 4 colors. I'm still trying to work out a hack to get a topo map or a geologic map printing on the top surface, haven't figure out how yet though. 

These are good for scaling up to like 500 square miles and mapping specific elevations with different colors, and quick visualization of that sort of data, for exploration purposes. You can do similar in Google Earth but it's plane feature in 3D view is buggy and shifts heights, which has caused me to unknowingly miss some areas on aerial research. Also, there is just something more intuitive about having the physical model in hand and seeing the topographic relation of all the terrain.

You can make your own .STL's from DEM data for any location in the world here: https://touchterrain.geol.iastate.edu/

 

[Valens Legacy]

Looks very interesting as another tool to use when out there looking for the best sites to hunt at. When you walk up to a new site with that model you can see a lot more useful information to guide you to a great location.

Thanks for the information.

[beatup]

good on you , looks like a very helpful tool .

[cobill]

@jasong Great project and very complicated for us dinosaurs!😂 I watched The Prospecting Geologist YT video this morning on 3D & LIDAR and got lost after 3 minutes. You could make some good money printing maps for customers(I would buy one on NNV) and I guess we know where your headed next.

Happy Thanksgiving, 

Bill

[Clay Diggins]

Here's a working interactive 3D model of Rich Hill with the mines and roads I made several years ago. You can turn off the labels by typing "L".

http://www.mylandmatters.org/3D/RH2.html

You are welcome to use my DEM and drape if you can figure out how to print it.

[jasong]

2 hours ago, cobill said:

@jasong Great project and very complicated for us dinosaurs!😂 I watched The Prospecting Geologist YT video this morning on 3D & LIDAR and got lost after 3 minutes. You could make some good money printing maps for customers(I would buy one on NNV) and I guess we know where your headed next.

Haha nah, detecting not in the cards for me this winter, most my time is taken with non-gold mineral projects now. Rich Hill area just has some visually interesting topography and is somewhat recognizable.

I actually already printed one of NNV but I put a bunch of super duper top secret info on it, so I didn't photo it. 😁 Problem I'm still trying to solve with the flatter areas like NNV is that sometimes the top surface gets little missed surface spots (you can see some in the bottom left of the photo above too). It appears to be a glitch with the printer since it only happens sometimes, but in any event the quality I'm not sure is high enough to sell unless I figured that out. But I think maybe a CNC version might be higher quality instead of 3D printed? That's next Christmas I guess haha.

However, I used carbon fiber filament on one last night and it looks ultra finished like a cast model, and no missed spots, so maybe that's the trick. That filament is pricey though, and destroys nozzles too, especially over large prints that take 4-12 hours. 

On mine I put one color at the topmost shoreline of Lake Lahontan, so you can easily see where it was over a large area. Similarly on another map, I have at an elevation I've found via field work to host a paleoplacer which is mostly buried, but the colors show locally eroded places beneath that to ATV to and investigate if the river might be exposed there. Etc, etc. You can see this stuff on Google Earth with a lot of scanning/zooming, but it takes like 5 seconds to see it all at once on these models. 

2 hours ago, Clay Diggins said:

You are welcome to use my DEM and drape if you can figure out how to print it.

Thanks, I'd love to be able to drape graphics over these. I just can't find a good way yet short of hand painting.

In my mind I think it might be possible to hack a method by adding a final layer option into an open source slicer and have it draw "pixels" composed of 3 dots of varying size - red, green, and blue. Essentially - emulate a TV or monitor. This is beyond my skillset though, and I think would require a nozzle to change to something as small as possible. 

I have a simpler hack idea that might work, but it'd be basic paths/shapes only and not nice aerial imagery. But I have a million ideas for a million things and it's rare for me to ever get to actually finishing one so I'll probably never get to it.  😄

[Gerry in Idaho]

Your capabilities on the computer are as good as your detector skills.  The only difference is I feel the one that will make you the most money, may not be detecting.  Great input and I love the detail.

[jasong]

16 minutes ago, Gerry in Idaho said:

Your capabilities on the computer are as good as your detector skills.  The only difference is I feel the one that will make you the most money, may not be detecting.  Great input and I love the detail.

Thanks, and yeah I definitely threw in the towel on detecting for dollars, it was brief but fun. 😄

Gold is easy to get motivated by and to keep a guy walking/ATV'ing around all day though, it's not easy to wake up in the morning and be like "heck yeah, I wanna go find some phosphates!" day in and day out in the same way gold will keep calling a guy back daily, but some of those secondary discoveries actually are quite valuable. Nowadays I try to use gold exploration as an excuse to get out and see what other things I can find while I'm out there.

 

[GotAU?]

Nice work Jason! I saw a similar print at the recent JPL/NASA open house. They 3D printed the terrain where the Curiosity rover is at and had a little scale printed model of the rover on it (much bigger than the terrain). It looked like a great way to teach how to read topographic lines and about different types of landforms for students.  I meant to try it out sometime- thanks for the link to the Iowa State University site- it will make doing this a whole lot easier!

[jasong]

2 hours ago, GotAU? said:

It looked like a great way to teach how to read topographic lines and about different types of landforms for students. 

For sure, I'm thinking about making something for the science center here too since they don't have a geology section. These would be more useful I think though if they were much larger, which is why I was thinking a CNC router might be better. I could make something like almost 2ftx4ft, which would be like a table top size. The 3D printed route though you can place colors at specific elevations, highlighting layers/topographic features, which you can't do with CNC, also the "topo lines" of relief are automatically added by slicer since it prints in layers. The ISU site does have a tiling feature which I haven't tried yet, so you can print and then glue multiple models together to make a larger model.

I'll just answer your PM questions here in case others are curious - the size of the one I showed is roughly 4"x6", but I've made a few 6"x9" ones too (whatever the 160mm and 200mm ISU sizes work out to be). My printer bed maxes out at 10" but you need room for the extrusion tower if using multiple colors. They take anywhere from 2 to 10 hours to print depending on the topography/size. Way less time if single color, but I only did multi-color so far. 

Printer is a Bambu X1C w/AMS. It's overkill, a P1 would work equally well. The Bambu slicer does a crazy good job calculating infill - it's 10% infill using adaptive cubic. No supports. PLA for filament, PLA Carbon Fiber for the black parts (not shown on this print). 0.4mm nozzle, 0.3mm layer height (0.2 gives you more "topo lines" of relief, but slower). Ironing on top layer w/15% flow - but I'm getting top layer inconsistencies on the widest flat parts. Sometimes the slicer adds a raft or brim, other times it randomly doesn't. 

Definitely ways to improve, but I'm still learning, and those settings seem to produce a decent model. More infill would make a more weighty model, these are pretty light, but I set it low to reduce printing time.