How To Create A 3D Topographical Map On A CNC

hey guys it's ben with meyer's wood shop we have pete and we're supporting the rowdyroma.com shirts we're matches today um we're going to do something cool pete's brother lives in ketchikan alaska the fortunate thing about that is that the mountain ranges give a lot of cool 3d topography and so we decided to grab a slab of what we think is oak and we're going to do a pretty big 24 by 12 topography map of the kachikan area so first thing we're going to do we're going to cut this down and then we're going to take it over to the cnc and everything else is going to be done on the onefinity i'll show you how i program this in vectric and how pete turned the map into an stl so let's cut this down and then i'll print show you some computer work so the first thing we did since none of this wood is really square it's pretty rough we just found like the um the area that is shortest so we measured off of here and we measured 25 and we made a line so that we know our 24 by 12 is in this dimension we're just leaving it rough there so we're going to cut that down with just a circular saw we have down there and then we're going to use this piece of wood and start from here alright so here is our piece we cut it is oak we can smell it when we cut it you can see it's pretty thick so that's what we're going to start with so we're going to take it inside and we're going to get on the computer all right so what we're going to do we cut the board down actually a little bit smaller because it's very very bowed so if i take out these wrenches you see when i put it in here it rocks really bad so what we need to do is flatten one side and then flip it over so i just have these wrenches as the spacers they're going to go in here so when i push down it's flat back here it's got a little bit of rock so i'm gonna put one back in the back corner and now when i touch all four sides it doesn't rock hardly at all so i'm gonna put some screws in to hold it down i'm gonna come in through the sides because i don't have any clamps that will clamp it down tight enough and then we'll get our flattening bit and we'll just flatten right across the top and we'll have one side flat to lay it down upside down backwards so it'll lay flat and then we'll carve out stuff all right so we just finished flattening the top i've taken the screws out of the sides you can see it's really nice and smooth on top and when we flip it over you can see now there's no rock in it at all so that's the benefit of a flattening bit on top of this so now we're gonna have to flatten this top as well we're gonna repeat the exact same process and after we're done we'll have a perfectly flat piece on both sides and then we can start doing our relief cut so i'm just going to repeat that process come on coming up i'm going to find the highest point on this as i jog this around that's where i'm going to zero it off that's where i'll start so i'll just take off a little bit there i usually run one pass at a time just so i don't go too deep because the thinner the stock the thinner we have to work with so i'll do one pass i'll uh set my z one millimeter lower one pass it again and i just kind of repeat that process until i see that we have flattened the entire surface so let me flatten this side and then we'll start the relief so at this point we are flattened on the top nice and smooth i do have this little bit of lip i didn't program it quite to go right over there but i'm just going to take a chisel and a piece of sandpaper i did leave this extra wide there's a reason you'll find out a little bit for zeroing off of so now i just gotta take this off orient it the way i want i'm gonna use blue tape to hold it down not these screws because when we do our relief we may cut into those screws so we're going to use blue tape because i don't really have another way to clamp it down and that'll hold it pretty well let me clean up this attach it back on here with blue tape and then we'll start the relief cut so if you don't know the blue tape method it's pretty great you're just going to take some blue tape go across all right so we got blue tape on the wasteboard we got blue tape on the piece now we're going to get some ca glue so i have some type on ca glue i'm just going to spread it all over the tape pretty liberally and we're going to take our piece and we're going to put it right on top just like that and now the weight of this is going to hold it down we could use some accelerant but i want to make sure that the piece is good so we're just going to wait uh maybe five ten minutes make sure that that ca glue is completely dried and then this will be immovable and then we'll start cutting our first um roughing full path on this piece all right we open up aspire we hit create new file we're going to do 10 wide by 22 tall one inch thick once we get to that we're going to click on modeling and we're going to go into this uh import model we're going to select the ketchikan model we made or whatever map file you did remember you got to watch rowdy roman's video i'll link the description down below to create that stl that can be used for cnc's or 3d printers all right once we get that going you can see down on the bottom we got that blue line it will actually load the file depending on your computer it may take a while down at the bottom you can see our boundary of our actual piece of wood and that red you can see our stl is way bigger than that so when we click on the stl gives us these options and i'm going to change the y to 10 make sure the ratio is selected when i hit apply it automatically changes the x and that will keep our scale so now it's fitting inside of the model when i click on that model i click snap to center and it puts it in the center of our piece of wood i'm going to drag this all the way down so that our whole model goes into that piece of wood because we want to capture the top most mountains inside the piece of wood we hit apply you can see we're in the 3d view and we can see what it looks like in wood which is perfect we're going to go back to the drawing tab over to the text tool created a text i put in catch a can and the coordinates into the text tool and for some reason this went vertically typically that's not supposed to happen but maybe that's what i used last so i'll have to change that here in a minute so i hit done i'm gonna move it up so i can see all the text it's really really big so we're definitely gonna have to shrink it but i'm gonna select what kind of text i like i wanted a little bit blockier letter so there would be more and to see it'd be easier to see so we went with this uh gothic and then i clicked on bold get made it a little bit bigger just the wider the text is the better off it would be the nicer it would cut out so this is kind of the text i went with so i needed to go to rotate it so i click on it i click on rotate i hit 90 degrees i hit apply rotates it correctly but i want the catch can above the coordinates so i click on the text again and it will show us i have it right in the text but for some reason it's upside down so easy fix we'll put the coordinates on top text on bottom but what we see is correct so we'll click on the arrow with like the um four way arrows in it that's the resize move tool so when i click on the edges it will resize it and when i do it that way it'll keep the aspect ratio if i clicked and just dragged from the right it would change the aspect ratio it wouldn't look right so here i'm just moving around and resizing to apply it somewhere in the water make it stick out and rise from the water because that's will be full of blue down there and it's a perfect place for it so i am finished i click on that vector of the text i click on create new component and i change the height of the component and we hit apply and then i click create new component and hit close and that makes a new 3d component to the model and it actually makes the letters 3d so if i hit tool path i'm going to just pin it there so it stays over there and i click on all of the vectors images in there i click roughing tool pass and i hit okay i select the size bit i'm using a quarter inch bit to rough it out i click on model boundary because i want the whole model to be roughed out so i just changed some feeds and speeds and these just kind of come with experience play with these there's some chip rate calculators feeds and speeds calculators out of here you can use but i just kind of go by what i've used we hit calculate at the bottom and it's going to show us actually what it's going to look like so i hit preview tool path and we can watch as the bit actually takes the material away this could be a long time watching depending on how fast it'll go so i'm going to speed up this video you're going to just watch this is again just the roughing tool pass you can see on the bottom it almost looks like it just flattens and once we get up closer to the taller mountains we can actually see some of the mountains protruding through so here it is really fast and in three passes we'll get all of our roughing done and then we need to set our finishing toolpath so we check out the 3d model for the roughing we're going to select the we can see what time it'll take here we're going to select the 2d model we're going to select our model again and we click on finishing tool path you see the round like ball icon i'm going to set it up for an eighth inch bit here because i'm thinking that might be enough detail i'm gonna put some feeds and speeds that i generally use for this again this will be different depending on the bit hit apply and um just double checking that i like what i put in there and we'll hit generate and this is going to show all the movements back and forth we'll hit the preview the tool path it'll show us really quick what it is again when you're doing a 3d tool path it's just one pass you notice the the roughing pass went down three times 3d tool paths 3d finishing just does it one from well in this case bottom to top so we are getting much finer detail so that's perfect it can go a little faster because there's not as much material coming out but you got to kind of play with the faster you go the less detail it's going to be so we can zoom in and check out the model i'm looking around kind of checking out how it is and i know i want to put water in there so i want to make sure everything is deep enough if i zoom in closer to the letters i'm going to check out the letters are they readable do they look good we can read what they are again this model isn't going to be exact what comes off the machine it's going to be pretty close in my experience it's a little cleaner coming off of the machine than the model but i want to change to a 16 inch bit i did that off camera but i changed to a 16th inch instead of an eighth inch and i got a whole lot more detail uh i'm trying to go with the biggest bit so it'll go faster but the detail just wasn't there so i changed to a 16 inch bit regenerated the simulation and was very happy with that so now we just need to we can check and see how long it will take but now we just need to save the tool path so i click on the roughing tool pass and i find the post processor 1finity if that doesn't exist you can download it from the forum and install it and then i click on save and i'm just going to name this 3d roughing i want to save both of these toolpaths as separate files makes it a whole lot easier in the end that's just what i've always done so i've done doing the same process for the finishing pass all right so what i have is i have my quarter inch bit in here my material is blue taped on there and it is not going anywhere it is now glued to that table so i'm going to go ahead and zero off the front left corner here because this is flat all the way across now i do have like a weird jaggy end but that's okay i left a inch in the file or half an inch on either side so i have plenty of room inside this file so i am going to go ahead and put that bit the touch probe underneath like that move this over so right in front of it i will connect the magnet i'll go ahead and probe for x y and z and now we're ready to go ahead and run the program so let me take this off i'll get my dust boot where my brushes just barely touch like so get my dust deal in there set my router number we're looking at about four eighteen hundred and i'm ready to start the cut so we're gonna start and this is gonna go back and forth a bunch of times we'll do a roughing pass and then we'll come back and do a finishing pass with a smaller bit to uh smooth it out and really get the [Music] detail [Music] all right so it just finished up got most everything cut off uh carved i'm gonna go ahead and right now we're not turning the controller off because it remembers where the zero is the z x and y we're just gonna jog this up and we're gonna jog this away right now so i can bring you in and you can take a look at what this looks like so here is what it looks like this is the 3d roughing pass you can tell this is where it's going to say catch a can down here and you can see i left some of the material proud over here and we're going to use that right now that's what it looks like from the side all right now we need to do a tool change so let's pull this all the way forward make it easy on ourselves pull this forward like this remove the hose and the suck it dust boot we're going to take out the bit we have in here it's our quarter inch and we're going to get our 16th inch all right so we got our 16th inch tapered ball nose we're going to put it in to our collet tighten it down like that then we're going to jog it over to that side over here because we need to re-zero the z we're not going to re-zero the x and y because our material is gone now over here so we can't put that plate back exactly where it was but this material as the same height as it was over here so we'll grab our probe remember when we only do z we flip it oops upside down and we probe inside the recess like that and you need to be a certain distance away from the probe or if it continues down i think about 20 millimeters and it doesn't find it it will error out so i like to be pretty close when i start it and just to test the continuity when i touch that to this it turns red so we're going to hit probe z it's going to probe it twice so now we know our z is for this bit because that changes each bit is different length so our z is different it's to this bit but the x and y i have not changed because i did not probe for x and y and z just for x or just for z so if right now i hit return to x and y and it asks me to confirm we're right at the starting point where the other bit is that's crucial to have them exactly the same or this won't come out right so we've done everything we can so actually for the sake of filming i'm just not going to use the dust boot we're just going to go ahead and plow through it and this isn't going to take off a lot of material because it's very tiny so and now we can close it up and we'll load our 3d finishing pass it will do its calculations we'll turn the router on and we'll start cutting all right so finished up a few days ago i haven't had time to get to it yet but uh my kids cleaned up the front here uh i haven't turned it off so we're just gonna move the z-axis back out of our way and then we'll come in and you can take a look at how it looks so here's what it looks like it came out pretty nice this is oak so it's very fibrous and we lost a lot of details in the letters which is unfortunate so it just once it grabbed these tiny letters it just fibrously pulled them all out and they're gone so we're gonna fix that in a different way but the map itself is pretty good we need to do a little bit of cleanup obviously we have a bunch of dust and stuff on there so we're going to suck it up i'm going to take a nylon brush and kind of give it a once over and then we're just going to kind of sand and chisel away these letters to make that flat and then we'll cut it out and we have some epoxy to pour so we're going to pour some epoxy but that's generally the topo map came out really nice it's really cool and you can see these flat areas where the water is going to be so i need to now pry this off of the waste board you can see that the blue tape held its own really well i'm kind of worried that it's going to be too strong and i'm going to have a hard time getting it off but that's what we'll do right now so here's what the blue tape looks like and the glue is in between the two so all we do is kind of pull off the blue tape like this all right so we got it out and right now we're going to put some tape along the side just to keep the epoxy from running over the edges so it doesn't really matter what tape we're going to use we are going to make a good lip for it just to keep the epoxy in and we're going to make sure that this gets rubbed really hard on the side because we don't want epoxy to leak through we're just creating a barrier basically a dam for the epoxy to stay in so it doesn't come out so we are doing a very thin layer because we want the blue epoxy to be down in these valleys where the rivers are so that is about what we're going to do we're not too worried about the edges because we're going to take it to the table saw and trim this as we go all right so what we're going to use we're going to use i have some wisebond bar and tabletop epoxy make sure you're not using a deep pore because it'll never cure we're using like thin layered ones i also have some wise shift this is a color shifting epoxy powder it's blue but it'll kind of shift between a blue to a deep purple so it'll look pretty cool depending on when you come in and look you know what angles you're looking at so it's blue water so we're going to use blue this is a one to one mix ratio we're going to mix this up and then we're going to mix in some color and then we'll pour in the river [Music] all right you can see we're going to cut out the square inside because a lot of this is waste so we're going to do that on the table saw and we'll cut it into a square all right so here we go we've got it squared up looks pretty cool it's a pretty cool piece of art it's actually upside down it's like this so we've got a plaque we're going to put down here we're going to put that on the laser and laser it but right now we're going to turn it over we're going to put a funny picture of a brother saying he loves him so let's put that on the laser and laser it all right so i just put it in the laser we're going to do a special marking on the back we're going to do the face of the person who made this and we're going to do because it's a little uh gift present so we're going to laser that on the back with the co2 laser i could do this with the jtech it would work but the co2 will do it a little faster so that's what i'm using so we'll just go ahead and laser this on i'll show you what it looks like after it's finished so what we're gonna do right now is make a little plaque with these aluminum business business card like things in the laser so we're just gonna uh take off the anodization we'll put this uh for the wording on this thing and then we'll attach it to the sign but let's go ahead and laser this first just finished up it looks really good so we're going to go ahead and put that at the bottom of the sign [Music] all right guys that's it that's how we created this 3d topo map it's a beautiful piece of art with a funny custom logo and saying on the back we use the adhesive that came with the metal to just put it right on there it's 3m it'll never come off we clear coated it and stain this side we got that miters nice and tight so it's a very nice piece of art so if you're following along i hope you have something that came out very similar you could easily sell this for a whole bunch of money it's beautiful art so hope that helps i hope you got to create something as cool as this we'll see you next time happy cutting [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Myers Woodshop

Views: 36,253

Keywords: woodworking, diy, cnc, topographical map, topographical maps, how to cnc a topographic map, topo maps, onefinity cnc, onefinity cnc review, onefinity cnc vs shapeoko, vectric topography, aspire 3d map, aspire 3d modeling, aspire 3d carving, aspire 3d tutorials, vectric aspire tutorial, vectric aspire 3d modeling, vectric aspire photo to 3d, vectric tutorials, vectric tutorials youtube, vectric tutorial videos, rowdy roman, map cnc, how to create a 3d topographical map on a cnc

Id: o6qcyXt1kuk

Length: 30min 47sec (1847 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 07 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/danman_d]

Nice, I've just been doing a topo project myself. I use a different software workflow to create my STL files than the one referenced in the video - it's a bit more complicated but gives more control over map projections, terrain exaggeration, etc. The process is basically:

• Download TIF DEM files from The National Map using TXT file export & bulk downloader
• Add all the TIFs into a QGIS project
• Merge them into a single raster layer
• Reproject the layer into my desired map projection
• Use a vector layer as a clipping mask to clip to my region of interest (state outlines in my case)
• Use the QGIS DEMto3D plugin to export it to an STL file

[u/usenet_alias]

STEP ONE: Buy Vectric Aspire at £1,500 ($1,995)

[u/thefrayedend81]

This is the guy who was really selling hard the Onefinity before it was released and never follows the rules of disclosure. This may or may not be a great video, but this guy is not a good guy and people should understand that the disclosure rules are rules meant to protect consumers(us). Anytime someone says something to him about it, he says "well no one complained when I didnt follow the rules in such and such video", then blocks them. My reply to that is, he should be following the rules in every video, period. We as consumers should not stand for people who lie and manipulate us.