A colleague of mine, a geography teacher, retired this year. As he has always been a big fan of the landscape of Zuid-Limburg, a province of The Netherlands situated in the south of the country, I thought I would make him a 3d-print of the landscape. It is the only area in The Netherlands that is not flat.

I did a search on Thingiverse, but it appeared that nobody had ever made a map like this before. Although there were many instructions on how to make one, I felt that I had to dig deeper.

I did find OmNomNom Creator there; a program capable of creating surface maps out of grayscale pictures. However, I needed a contour map of Zuid-Limburg for that.

After looking a bit further, I found a brilliant website by the Dutch Waterschappen. They had transferred data of all measured heights in The Netherlands onto a map. The best thing about it was the fact that you could even change the colours of the map!

So, I zoomed in on Zuid-Limburg and made a grayscale map.

After that, it was easy. I made a screenshot, some simple changes in Photoshop, (I made the surroundings completely white and removed some artifacts), dragged and dropped it into OmNomNom Creator, chose the right parameters and started the conversion. It then opened in OpenScad. It took some time to compile and render it, about 15 minutes. Then I saved it as an STL-file. This took some time too, and if you’re trying this, don't stop the program! The STL-file is very large: more than 26 MB.

I uploaded it into Cura and about two hours later, it came out great on our Ultimaker.
The best thing about it? My colleague liked it!

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Thank you, Ilja Klink.