Middle East Country Tiles for Data Visualization

thingiverse

This project was created for MATH 401 - Math Through 3D Printing during the Fall 2022 semester at George Mason University. Created 11/16/2022. The purpose of the project was to use 3D printing to display data in a way which is useful when visualized in three dimensions. I decided to create a population map that scales the countries upwards based on their population, but the tile-like nature of the STL files means that you can really use this for any numerical data you desire. Each country model was generated using Wolfram Mathematica and was joined together using SuperSlicer, however this could easily be done in other slicers as well. For whatever reason, Kuwait was unable to be generated as a 3D model by Mathematica so it was simply ignored when creating the map. The included image is GCode displayed in the slicer. In my case, I allowed for 1mm = 1 million people, however, if the difference in data is massive enough, a logarithmic scale may be used. This model prints without supports, and generally does not need a brim or raft on a correctly tuned printer. No post-processing should be needed except in the case you wish to paint it or remove stringing. The whole model took around 20 hours to print on my Ender 3 Pro with Klipper firmware. Population data was gathered from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Middle_Eastern_countries_by_population