3D Printing LIDAR

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I have LIDAR data that has been previously processed in ESRI, and is in .adf format. I can import this into Map 3D (through 'Add Raster Image or Surface Connection') and view/manipulate the surface as I like. What I want to be able to do is 3D print this terrain, but printing surfaces is not possible. I've seen a few suggestions elsewhere involving somehow converting to a mesh of triangles and extruding the surface, which sounds perfect for my needs, but I'm not sure how to do this for my data set.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.

[Murph_Map]

When you say a 3D print do you mean with a 3D printer? Have you looked at the create contour layer tools? 

[Anonymous]

Yes, with a 3D printer. Could you give a little more detail on what I could try with the create contour layer tools? So far I have tried the following method. I can see this working on a smaller scale, but with my amount of data, it is long and tedious and crashes my PC.

- Import the .adf files as a surface

- Extract the triangles as objects

- Use F2S.lsp (http://www.realerthanreal.com/autolisp/) to convert all the faces to solids