After obtaining the stl files for our thickened surface models we also wanted to be able to attach contour lines to our figures. We found the easiest way to do this was to create these contour lines using maple and merge them onto our surfaces in Tinkercad.
The following shows the contour lines of a paraboloid. After installing the plots and plottools commands you can enter the parametric equation followed by the x range, the thickness/ radius of the contours and any other details you would like to add to the plot, in addition you will need the y range and how often you want a contour line to be drawn. From there you can display the plot and download it as an stl file.
Here are two paraboloids made with the “thicken” maple file and merged with our contour file in Tinkercad. The model on the left was made with a 0.08 radius while the model on the right was made with a 0.06 radius. The surface paraboloid itself was made with a 0.05 thickness.
An alternative method of this displaying two sides of the equation together. One is the positive side while the other is the negative side. When both sides are displayed together you receive the full contour.
The following picture shows this method using the equation for a saddle. In our research we imported this into Tinkercad twice, once right side up and again upside down and rotated 90 degrees. This made up for the missing bottom half of the contours.
A similar method can also be used in order to obtain the wireframe version of your models. This following picture also shows how to download the plot as a stl file, which will need to be altered to fit the desired path in your computer.
