3D printing the planet (or bits of it)

This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a good starter project, and is currently being worked on by Finley Stirk. It is co-supervised with Michael Dales.

Thanks to a combination of satellite information, remote sensors and data-science, we now are able to reason about places all over the globe from the comfort of our desks and offices. But sometimes, you just want to be able to see or touch an area to understand it properly: the flat 2D-projection on a screen doesnt necessarily reveal the subtle geography of a landscape, and data locked into a computer feels less immediate than even a physical model of the same area.

In recent work, Michael Dales has experimented with making 3D-printed models of surface terrain to make some areas of study more relatable. By combining high resolution Digital Elevation Maps (DEMs), and CAD software we were able to scale and print this section of a Swedish forest used to observe Moose migrations.

However, this method is not easily scalable as:

• The data sets involved are cumbersome in size.
• The resulting meshes are very detailed, causing even professional grade CAD Software to struggle.
• Raw data does not normally work out of the box for visualisations as 3D-model. For example, water levels have to be added, and often the height has to be accentuated to make it look realistic to our eyes.

There are some general tools that can help with this, but they don’t support adding custom data layers in that would allow us to project data-science results onto a physical surface, and nothing that is open-source that others can readily work with.

The summer project

We’d like to build a simple workflow based around open source tools such as Python, GDAL, and optionally QGIS, to take geospatial results from ecologists and render them ready for 3D-printing. The goal is to make it trivial for ecologists to combine datasets and render them physically without having to become experts in 3D-modelling.

In this project we’d like to:

• Use off the shelf Python libraries to select datasets, and covert them to 3D-meshes
• Provide a way to generate multi-colour meshes for use with the Bambu Carbon printers that we have access to which support up to 8 colours of filament
• Test it using one of the active projects in the group, such as the LIFE global extinction risk maps

We'll have access to 3D printers in the Cambridge Makespace, so this is a good project for a student who wants to get into the nitty-gritty of making things!