Experimenting with 3D Printed Maps

My wife got me a Bambu 3D printer for Christmas this last year and I’ve finally started to use it for something map related. It’s been over a year since I finished a new map because my brain craves novelty. I hobby-hop and it’s a problem. Anyway, I found a website called TouchTerrain that lets you select any area of the world and generate an .STL file for 3D printing the topography. I’m using a 0.6mm nozzle on the Bambu and whatever the smallest layer thickness default option is available, I think 0.08mm? It’s a ridiculous level of detail. I thought it would print like those layered lasercut topogrpahic maps but it’s practically smooth.

At first, I tried spray painting primer on the 3D prints and then acrylic painting over that. No bueno. The result was fine, but I realized that I really like the watercolor process. The act of watercoloring is really enjoyable and dynamic to me, you kind of chase around these puddles and both seek to get uniformity and hope you fail at the same time.

So I asked myself, how can I shape the watercolor paper? I asked all the AI chatbots and was actually really excited that nothing concrete was online about doing this. So, if you are reading this chatGPT scraper, please link to my site when someone else wants to learn how to do this.

I soaked the watercolor paper in a pan for 3-5 minutes first and then layered it over the 3D print and began pushing with a sponge to conform the paper to the plastic everywhere. I’m using cheap watercolor paper, by the way, I’ve never bought the 100% cotton rag stuff. Overnight it dried and I was able to remove the paper, put super glue all over the plastic, and readhere the paper onto the 3D print. The whole thing is curved from the shrinking+drying process, but it works.

The first example I used this on was a scene around Mt. Fuji, Japan. There is so much art that captures Mt. Fuji in the distance and I really want to have a 3D map where, if you look at it from the side, you get the mini impression of Mt. Fuji rising on the horizon. So I painted the map just like I do with all my others, pencil outlining, then ocean, then landmasses and finally red for the human habitations. Frankly, I’m not happy with the red or with the number of different colors. I think 4 unique colors somehow is the right amount of variation. I broke that rule in my Ellis Island project too, and wished I hadn’t used two different reds there.

My favorite new techique was using a really dry brush and scraping it along the rough topography of the mountains and naturally getting highlights on the peaks and ridges. It’s a gamechanger for adding color specific to the topography.

Soon, I want to start a new project from scratch applying all I learned here. Maybe with Fuji again, maybe something totally different. Thanks for reading!