I have a bathymetric shapefile that I’ve adapted for eventual 3D printing. Part of my challenge is the sparsity of contour lines, which creates substantial space between contours. I previously tried GRASS/QGIS/SAGA/etc with limited success. Now I’m trying FME. FME processing is much easier, but the issue I’m trying to solve now is roughness at contour edges. This is the workflow I’m using:
It produces a reasonable DEM output that I’m processing through QGIS with DEMto3D:
Banding from contours:
A closer look at the .stl shows hard contour line edges instead of smoother transitions:
I’ve read some about using PointCloudCombiner and NumericRasterizer, but don’t know if that will address this situation. I also tried a workflow with NumericRasterizer, but the results were similar. In the past I’ve tried gaussian filters, or other smoothing techniques, but that really disrupts the shorelines. Feedback is appreciated.