Frost Architects contacted me to make a 3d-printed model of their project at Vollen Marina, near Oslo.

I recieved a 3d-model made in ArchiCAD.

ArchiCAD, with the plugin ArchiTerra, often produce a triangulated, jagged surface of the terrain. This surface is almost impossible to cut or boolean, especially when youre doing several, typically hundreds of operations on the same mesh.To get around this “problem” I made a nice, dense, quad mesh and conformed it over the triangulated mesh.The result is a watertight quad mesh with smooth slopes, ready to get sliced and diced.“Chaos mesh” from ArchiCAD/ArchiTerra.Super smooth quad mesh.From this mesh I used boolean operations to make the footprint for the houses, and extracted the roads. The terrain was also cut into smaller pieces to fit inside my 3d-printers.The buildings from ArchiCAD had to be remodelled to get rid of the overhangs. All 92 of them…The 159 different objects, sliced, cut and booleaned ready for 3d-printing.Overview of the physical model, with all cuts made.Making sure the prints dont warp, they are all printed with a brim. This brim has to be manually removed after printing. This is a tedious process.Parts getting ready. Notice the red spots on the 2d-print to the right, this was initially intended for the placement of magnets.The MDF baseplate with frame getting painted to match the printed parts.All parts were modelled to accommodate magnets. This plan was scrapped in favour of good old glue in the end.I also made the whole project in the scale 1:1000, just for fun. The 1:1000 model is hanging on my livingroom wall at the moment.I made several height-indicators, helping the architects make decisions with the client on the fly.Lenght indicators were also made.The terrain and roads were 3d-printed with a layerheight of 0,3 mm. Try that with foamcore!Each layer represents 15 cm.If the model is cut at the right level, the seams are almost invisible.Height notations were modelled onto some of the buildings.Notice the effect of the reflection on the 2d-print and how the graphics add depth to the model.Cars and buses printed at scale 1:500, they are pretty small.Not an architectual model. Art 😉Model delivered at client office.