An update on the global typography. I’ve filled in the western hemisphere, and extruded each country in respect to their population per sq. mile. Because the extrusions are essentially cone shaped, I’m actually extruding by the square root of the population per sq. mile. This also emphasizes the differences between most countries while making the sharp peaks not quite as harsh.

The result of printing…

Was totally fail.

I’m not entirely sure what the source of the issue was, but the thing printed very crazy. It also did not print cored out, which was a very expensive mistake. A solid piece of crap. I hypothesize that I wasn’t calculating the winding order of the shape faces properly, and that there are face overlaps or small minute errors that bubble up this way.

I’m looking into the program Triangle, which creates a Delaunay triangulation of an arbitrary shape. This seems to be a really powerful program and hopefully will work out to create a more accurate STL file.