I was wondering if there was a way to export the 3D meshes into one of the common 3D design formats? What I'm looking to do is get them into a CAD program, convert to STL format for 3D printing so I can slice and print out lakes or parts of lakes on one of my 3D printers. I already know of ways to convert DEM and LIDAR data to do land based 3D prints but doing lakes would make for some interesting educational displays or for use in conservation projects

I have a hunch such an application would be extremely popular with sportsmen, environmental scientists and educators and certainly something to think about

Longjohn119,

It takes a bit of monkeying around, but if you save the depth contour lines from RM as a shapfile you can create a DEM in QGIS from the RM depth contour lines. I have done this several times and it seems to work quite well. At a high level, the steps to get a DEM that you could the use for 3D printing are:

1. Export depth contour lines from RM as a shapefile.
2. Open shapefile in QGIS.
3. Extract the nodes of the contour lines as a shapefile with point data.
4. Now use the QGIS "interpolation" function to create a DEM (Raster file) using the points as the input data source.
5. Then you should have a decent DEM that you could use to print in 3D.

If you would like to chat more about the details of doing this with QGIS, shoot me an email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

Cheers,
Jeff

You can also export the generated raster in the ESRI grid format (right click menu in contour view), which you can import directly into QGis and similar as a DEM.

Thanks Matt. I tried this last night and it works better than what I was doing. There are fewer steps to generate the DEM and the process is simpler.

Matt wrote:
That should work easy enough, then I can just align it with the land DEMs which would be a lot easier to do than if I was using just a 3D mesh that's not calibrated and trying to align that to the converted land DEMs in a CAD program. I'll likely have to cut it into sections and that would probably be easier to do in QGIS before I convert to a printer friendly format. I'm a lot better with mapping software than I am with 3D CAD software. It's like coding, I can usually hack together some boilerplate code and make it work but I'm really a hardware guy and I've been making my own maps since 2006. Actually I have never bought a digital map because my state (Iowa) makes pretty much all the data you want available and it is aerial mapped every year by the USDA

Thanks that should give me enough info to work with

Matt wrote: Hi, I managed to export in ESRI format, but I never managed to do it in DEM. Can you please describe how to do this in more detail?