3D Terrain Printing
03/09/09 12:03 Filed in: News
3D Terrain Printing
by Albert Kiefer
The summer holidays are coming to a close for most of us. Some will have spent some unforgettable days, or weeks, in a fantastic location like the Swiss or French Alps, the Grand Canyon. Some will even have scaled the Mount Everest (although these might be few and far between...).
Most of you will have taken tons of digital photographs, others take a small bottle of soil or a flask of water but now there’s a new way to grab hold of a piece of your holiday locations. A 3D print!
With the advent of commercially and economically viable rapid prototype printing solutions a number of 3D printing services are quickly becoming available to the public. A very interesting niche is now being presented by Terrainprint in the UK.
UK based Terrainprint.co.uk has a 3D printing service hooked up to a kind of Google Earth type of application that quickly allows you to travel to you location of choice, make a selection and press print. After being presented with a 3D preview of the textured terrain you can order it and presto: your holiday memento extraordinaire will be on its way.
These items which have a very clear pricing structure and there should be no surprises with models that are unexpectedly pricey.
There are several types of overlay graphics that you can color your 3D terrain model with, although at the moment the full range of options is only for the USA area. But still, the continents texturemapping will have a great realistic projection of the terrain for you and should be the general choice for the holiday snap memento.
I can well see applications for terrain printing in the fields of location or prototype planning or scouting for motion picture production (although these companies might already have 3D printers hanging around their own facilities), location and site planning and presentation for architects, a special relational gift for traveling agencies, mementos for tourists that want to document and tell about their journeys, etc.
It will be well worth checking out Terrainprint.co.uk and play with the application a while. Have a test print in the smallest footprint and see how that works out.
by Albert Kiefer
The summer holidays are coming to a close for most of us. Some will have spent some unforgettable days, or weeks, in a fantastic location like the Swiss or French Alps, the Grand Canyon. Some will even have scaled the Mount Everest (although these might be few and far between...).
Most of you will have taken tons of digital photographs, others take a small bottle of soil or a flask of water but now there’s a new way to grab hold of a piece of your holiday locations. A 3D print!
With the advent of commercially and economically viable rapid prototype printing solutions a number of 3D printing services are quickly becoming available to the public. A very interesting niche is now being presented by Terrainprint in the UK.
UK based Terrainprint.co.uk has a 3D printing service hooked up to a kind of Google Earth type of application that quickly allows you to travel to you location of choice, make a selection and press print. After being presented with a 3D preview of the textured terrain you can order it and presto: your holiday memento extraordinaire will be on its way.
There are several types of overlay graphics that you can color your 3D terrain model with, although at the moment the full range of options is only for the USA area. But still, the continents texturemapping will have a great realistic projection of the terrain for you and should be the general choice for the holiday snap memento.
I can well see applications for terrain printing in the fields of location or prototype planning or scouting for motion picture production (although these companies might already have 3D printers hanging around their own facilities), location and site planning and presentation for architects, a special relational gift for traveling agencies, mementos for tourists that want to document and tell about their journeys, etc.
It will be well worth checking out Terrainprint.co.uk and play with the application a while. Have a test print in the smallest footprint and see how that works out.