3D Print of Puerto Rico

A Really Cool Project and Gift Idea

For Valentine’s Day I got a great idea for a gift to my wife.

As some of you may or may not know, my wife is from Puerto Rico and the Isla de Encanta is always on her mind. I also know that she enjoys doing make-up and has a decent size collection of brushes.

While I am not an afficianado on the latter, I was able to put her interest in her homeland and her interest in make-up together to create a decent Valentine’s day gift project. This ultimately yielded a 3D printed map of Puerto Rico that can hold her make-up brushes (well, 5 of them anyway).

How I Started

Originally I wanted to take the lazy route and sought a 3D model of Puerto Rico from the internet. I could not find any that were appropriate for my needs, so I did what anyone with training in Geography would do and I went and grabbed a DEM (digital elevation model) of Puerto Rico to use for my project. I opened the DEM in R (statistical programming language) and utilized a number of packages to crop the extent to just the “big island” of Puerto Rico (no disrespect to Culebra and Vieques), and then plot the new 3D…