Generally-speaking, if I want to print a suburb or small city, how big of an area can I expect to be able to be printed on my P1s land look good? I know it depends on how much detail I want, but is there a rough size?
Thanks.
Hi, @user_1316983082!
I’m sorry that I can’t immediately provide help, but could you please elaborate on what you’re looking for? Maybe provide an example, and/or what you mean by “area” or “size”.
I would love to help, but I would need a bit more information first. This original post is slightly to vague to provide an answer.
If I wanted to print say, New York, with just 1 panel, it wouldn’t work because the object is so large with so many streets and buildings
so I would have to decrease the size of New York (maybe just Manhattan) to get a good print. So I am wondering what size (square miles) in general would work and produce a usable result.
I have no solution to your question but I am familiar with those prints.
Where/How do you find a given geographic area?
I have seen many of those prints but never with some note saying how the data was captured and converted to an appropriate file type and size.
Myself, if I had a model of the type you want to print, I’d throw it on the slicer, slice it, see if it gives an error (too big) or too small you might could scale it up. Just making sure all 3 axes are set to scale up.
This 100% depends on the complexity/size of the model and there will be no good general answers for area as it entirely depends on the model. You will need to scale it in the slicer and see what looks good to you. It also depends at what scale the model was created, if it’s a huge model you’ll have a lot of issues scaling it down to like 0.5% so it fits the printer, conversely if it’s tiny and you scale up to say, 1000%, you will likely not get the details you may expect
Realistically, it all depends on exactly what resolution you want, so trial and error will definitely be needed.
If I were doing a similar project and wanted something very HD, going off the dimensions of Manhattan (13.4 by 2.3 miles) and assuming the print bed is 256*256mm, I would do 1.25 miles per 250 mm. This would result in a final assembled model of about 11 plates by 2 plates, or ~275cm (9 feet) by 50cm (12feet).
[All this math is approximate, as I did it mostly mentally]
Though this is all hypothetical, to make a real-world model, I would decide how much physical area you have for the model and scale based on the actual geographical dimensions.