Looking for Topography Cutting simplfied

Hi All,
I teach at an elementary school and have been using the glowforge full force with all of the kids. I have a fifth grader who wants to cut a topographic map of the Grand Canyon. I want to simplify it because obviously the thousands of contour lines are not duoble. Does anyone know where to find a very simplified grand canyon contour map or can point me in the direction of how to make one! I am very new to this as we just got the forge last month!
Thanks!

3 Likes

I saw one here but like you said it’s got a boatload of lines. You could probably open it in something and delete a few of the lines. (Or turn it into an end table.)

Grand Canyon Topo Maps

5 Likes

That’s one ambitious fifth grader. All of that kind of work I have seen here has been about converting the GIS data into a usable format. Sorry.

3 Likes

It takes a lot of time and effort to either edit down a complex file from an existing data source (i.e. GIS data) or hand-tracing an image in a vector image application (Inkscape, AI, etc.)

You can, however, greatly simplify it if you find the right source image or data, to only cut the perimeter, and simply score a number of further layers and canyon floor details.

A suitable task for a motivated student to take on, I’d think…

2 Likes

This could be an awesome vary power engrave just in half-inch-thick maple or something similar. The source is here but not very user-friendly.

2 Likes

Just stumbled on this, but it’s a perfect example of what I mean by simplifying it to make it a reasonable project for a 5th grader (or their teacher!)

2 Likes

Just a quick example. the right-side is the grey and the left is the 3D.

What a fun project! There are several 3d models of the Grand Canyon on Thingiverse.
You can slice your own topos out of any one of them to the “resloution” and material thickness you want in Fusion 360’s Slicer (don’t be put off by the alarming price tag, it’s free to hobbyists and educators) :smiley:

1 Like

How’d you get the height map off of that site? Not intuitively obvious and no Help/FAQ buttons I can find.

Like I said not user friendly. First find the place you want and center it on the page then hit download and it will complain and ask for a name. I give it a random name and cancel the download. And I will have a square I can move and resize. In the US there is a lot of ways to view it, outside the US not so much, I often use Google maps to get a long&lat but it uses different notation. Place names may work for a search but usually not. In any case when you finally have the square at the size you want and the place you want you can download that and get several in a zip that I take the largest one.

Not so user friendly but I don’t know a way to get a better free result.

1 Like