Crossing the border between the virtual and the physical and viceversa has some fascination. We’ve been playing with 3d landscape generators for a while now and meanwhile 3d-printing also became a more regular tool for us as well. The layered structure of 3d-filament prints reminds of topological structures anyhow, so why not make something beautiful out of it?

To create this 3d-print we had to go through several steps: First we create the basic terrain info in Gaea. Gaea is a real breeze to simulate erosion and folding of geological structures. In a way it lets you play god for a little. When we were happy with the shape of our terrain, we export the height information as a a simple bitmap. This information then goes into Blender to prepare the 3d-Block and cut out the holes for the towers. To keep as much of the detail as possible the ensuing model was close to 5 million polygons and we were happy to see that Blender still could handle the boolean operations to cut in the holes for the „towers“. This final model then went into the Prusa Slicer software to prepare the printing code.

Finally we are ready to send it to our trusted Prusa MK3. After roughly 24 hours the landscape was done printing. It is still quite marvelous how this little machine operates flawless for a whole day straight.

Finally some design decisions were made. We wanted to treat the printed silver filament like a naturally grown material and keep the printing structure. To emphasize the „natural“ feel we complemented it with the oak frame and some towers to make the slopes better readible. Please read the subtle light effects on the thin borders of the terrain.

No idea where the next steps could be, but we are superhappy with the results.