Thunderhill Raceway Elevation Model

thingiverse

A highly detailed topological model of Thunderhill Raceway Park was created using data from Kairos Aerospace as part of the Self Racing Car project. Thunderhill features numerous interesting terrain changes that significantly affect driving dynamics, making it easier to understand these changes when viewed in 3D. The track was manually drawn with a marker because an easy way to incorporate this into the print could not be found. Print Settings Printer Brand: LulzBot Printer Model: Mini Rafts: No Supports: No Resolution: 0.12mm Infill Percentage: 20% Notes: This model will take a considerable amount of time to print, requiring around 8 hours on my Lulzbot Mini. A high resolution can be achieved, but it is recommended to have a thick bottom layer. Post-Printing Trace out the track After printing, locate the model in Google maps or obtain a track map and trace the path with a pencil. Then, use a marker to outline the path. How I Designed This Model I started by downloading the GeoTiff file from the specified location. This large file measures 6000 x 6000 pixels. I then imported it into QGIS and utilized its raster tools to reduce the resolution to approximately 1500 x 1500 pixels. Next, I used phstl to convert the reduced-resolution GeoTIFF to an STL file. The resulting file was still quite large, measuring around 150MB. I then imported this file into MeshMixer and extruded it to transform the surface into a solid object, also increasing the z value by a factor of four. This resulted in a file that measures 330MB and contains approximately six million polygons. To further refine the model, I used MeshMixer to reduce the polygon count by 85%, ultimately resulting in a file that is 44MB in size and contains about one million polygons.