In this assignment, I chose to visualize the Taal Volcano located on Luzon island in the Philippines and the second most active volcano in the country. In January 2020, this volcano erupted which resulted in nearby towns being covered by volcanic ashes for weeks. Here, you can also find an interesting landmass called Vulcan Point, the world’s largest island within a lake (Main Crater Lake) that is situated on an island (Volcano Island, aka Taal Island) located in a lake (Lake Taal) within an island (Luzon).
I used SRTM30 DEM from NASA for the terrain. Using the DEMto3D plugin in QGIS, I extracted the Taal volcano terrain to get a model with 150mm x ~160mm width and length respectively. I tried using several vertical exaggeration values but in the end, I used x2.5 to create a more noticeable terrain. The recommended spacing of 0.2 mm was retained and the minimum model height was set to 0 as it was the lowest point from the terrain.
To add colors to the model, I exported the model to .stl format and opened it in 3D Builder where I split it into four parts to delineate water, the volcano island, low-lying area, and the hilly/mountainous areas. However, the Vulcan Point is not visible in the model, maybe due to the resolution of the DEM used. Below is the final 3D terrain when viewed in 3D Builder.
The Department of Geoinformatics in UPOL has a number of 3D printers that we can use to print this model. For this small project, we used the Ultimaker 3D printer. To print the actual model, some preprinting settings was configured in a software associated to the 3D printer that will be used. Once these settings are set, the printing can be started easily.
The model took almost four hours to finish printing but the output looks really awesome.
