I've been thinking about ways to use data from google earth in Rhino and found a technique using Sketch Up as an interim stage. I used this technique as a starting point for this workshop.

Above: I think it’s quite astounding that you can just choose anywhere in the world and get the terrain information.

Above left: I saved the terrain as a SketchUp version 4, file and opened it in Rhino. I thin had to resize it and change to texture map to default, so I could see the texture.

Above right: Then I expanded the Z axis to exaggerate the hills. I tried a painstaking experiment with patching to add the sides, but Andy suggested the drape function. You lose a little of the resolution but that didn’t matter for this job.

Above left: I added some very basic buildings. Above right: Using basic boolean operations I split the block into 4 smaller ones.

Reflecting on the processes, I’m excited about how the process of laying down the plastic in layers creates levels to describe the terrain in exactly the way a contour map does. In fact, printing with a lower resolution gives better results than a finer print.