3D Printing

University of Maryland Students 3D Print a Detailed Micro-Sized UMBC Campus

Two engineering students were able to use 5000 aerial photographs of the University of Maryland Baltimore County campus and a 3D Systems ProJet 3D Printer to create an exact replica of the entire campus at 1/4000th scale. Making your school smaller may make it easier to get to your classes, but I’m betting it wouldn’t make it easier to find a parking space that still wasn’t seventeen miles away from them.

UMBC aerial 3d-printing

Taking 5000 aerial photographs might sound like a boring task, but UMBC engineering students Stephen Gienow and Lindsay Digman used an octo-copter drone outfitted with a Canon Powershot ELPH 520 camera to do the work for them. The 8-propellered drone covered the entirety of the campus, all the while flying a carefully laid out grid pattern to cover the maximum distance possible while still obtaining images from multiple angles. The octo-drone needed three trips to cover the entire campus, but it only took about an hour for each trip in order to take all of the necessary images.

aerial octocopter 3d scanningAfter collecting all of their pictures, Gienow and Digman used a 3D modelling program called Agisoft Photoscan that can turn multiple 2D images into highly detailed 3D renderings. The program is similar to the technology used to create 3D Google Maps, however because it doesn’t need to render the image in a matter of seconds it can build extremely detailed 3D models without the odd perspective and even create trees that look like actual trees, not the gloppy piles of melted green things that are meant to represent trees. Provided that you give it enough detailed photographs, Photoscan will automatically generate point clouds, polygonal models and digital elevation models and even add texture maps. This will allow you to build your large-scale, highly detailed 3D model without having to render and texture it yourself.

Take a look at the full 3D model of the campus on Sketchfab. But be careful, it is a very large file:

Once they had constructed the complete 3D model it was sent to micro-manufacturing and fabrication company Potomac Photonics. Potomac Photonics specializes in the fabrication and prototyping of extremely small parts and manufacturing small-scale components, so they were ideally suited to produce such a small yet highly detailed 3D print. The final 3D map had a 10 centimeter per pixel resolution with 10 meter GPS accuracy, so they were able to compress it down and 3D print it 4,000 times smaller than the actual campus size using a 3D Systems Projet stereolithography 3D printer.

Stephen Gienow posted a really fantastic write up about the project on his blog and he has some great tips if you want to try doing something like this yourself. According to Gienow and Digman, they intend to turn this project into a business by providing 2D mapping, 3D scanning and rendering and landscape 3D printing services.

UMBC 3d printing model