PreBeta: 3D View: Fence diagrams from drillhole contacts

This feature gives you the ability to easily create a fence diagram between multiple drillholes in the 3D view.

You can:

• Create multiple fences

• Label the units on the fence panels

• Choose for the contacts in the fence panels be straight-line segments or follow curvature of contact surfaces

• Specify if the contacts are for the top of the unit, or the bottom of the unit

• Visualize units that don’t reach to the next drillhole (pinchouts)

• Turn individual layers on or off in the fence diagram

• Save the fence diagram to an image

• Use fill colors and patterns to define the fill for each unit layer

Prerequisites: You do need a drillhole layer (with point, interval or keyword data) and contact points created in the 3D view prior to creating a fence diagram. You do not have to create contact surfaces prior to the fence diagram. If the contact surfaces exist, you can choose to use their shape to define the unit boundaries in the fence panels, but that is optional.

Some resources that may be helpful:

• 3D Drillhole: Create, edit and export contact points

• Stack Smarter: Introducing Surfer's New Contact Surfaces (Webinar)

To use this feature, all you need to start with is a drillhole layer (with point, interval or keyword data).

Follow these steps:

1. I’ll start with a drillhole layer. Open Drillholes_ForFence.srf (attached to this article) in Surfer 33 preBeta. It contains a single drillhole layer, with lithology keyword data (a type of interval data).

2. Right click over the map and click 3D View. Once the 3D view opens, you can see the individual drillholes in 3D space showing the lithology as keyword intervals and a color scale.

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3. Create the contacts.

   1. In the Contents window, right click over Drillhole | Drillhole and click Create Contacts.

   2. In the Create Contacts dialog, click the Load Contacts button, select Contacts.srfdhc (also attached to this article) and click Open. We are creating 4 contacts.

      1. Note: the contacts were created by specifying the Upper/Lower units, and that the upper surface is “Any others” and the lower surface is the lithology unit. These contacts are for the top of the unit.

      2. 

   3. Check the box next to Create Surfaces and click OK. The contact points and contact surfaces are created. Creating the surfaces isn't required, but it's a good way to verify that the contacts are defined in the shape that you want/expect.

      1. 

         Note: you can select Drillhole | Drillhole | Surfaces to view the gridding parameters on how the surfaces are created.

   4. Uncheck the box next to Drillhole | Drillhole | Surfaces to turn the surfaces off in the view (they can still exist, just not be visible).

4. Create the fence diagram. In the Contents window, right click over Drillhole | Drillhole and click Add Fence.

5. On page 1 of the Create 3D Fence Diagram dialog, 

   1. Select the drillholes you want in your fence from the list on the left. For example, click MW-103, MW-105, and MW-74.

   2. Click the Add > button and they’re added to the list in the middle.

      1. The drillholes in the fence will be connected in the same order that the drillholes are listed in the middle here. Feel free to drag and drop the drillholes so that they’re in the order you want them to be in the fence diagram.

   3. A preview is displayed for the fence on the right. In the preview window, you can see the drillholes and how they are currently connected in the fence. You have the option to:

      1. turn the preview on/off

      2. turn the labels on/off

      3. use the tool buttons or the mouse wheel to zoom in and out

      4. use the mouse to left-click and drag to pan

      5. 

   4. Click Next.

6. On page 2 of the Create 3D Fence Diagram, this is where we set the colors of the contact lines and layers. If using keywords from the drillhole data to determine the contacts, the colors will already be automatically assigned.

   1. At the top of the dialog, make sure Contact represents the is set to Top of layer (highlighted in blue), since the contacts are for the top of the layer.

   2. In the table, Layer 1 is actually the Fill unit. I didn’t create a contact for the top of the Fill, which is why it is not there. Click where it says Layer 1 and edit the name to be Fill.

   3. Then click on the purple color for the Fill layer, and on the right change the Foreground color to something like Pale Yellow.

   4. You can rename these layers anything you like, or you can leave them as is. For this example, edit the names of the other layers to remove “Top of”, so Top of Limestone becomes simply Limestone.

   5. 

   6. Click Finish. The fence is created and is named Fence 1 in the Contents window.

7. At this point, you can either:

   1. Create another fence. Perhaps you wish to create a fence connecting different drillholes going in different directions. Click on 3D View | Drillhole Fences | Add Fence again. You can create as many fences as you like.

   2. Edit the existing fence. Maybe you want to update the color, pattern, or connected holes. Select the fence you want to edit, and click 3D View | Drillhole Fences | Edit Fence. If you don’t want to change the holes connected, click Next. Make the changes you wish and click Finish.

8. The fence itself and the layers can also be edited in the Properties window.

   1. Fence properties. In the Contents window, select Fence 1. In the Properties window, you can:

      1. Change the resolution of the fence. If you have multiple layers, lines or labels, you may wish to select a high resolution than the automatic setting for more clarity.

      2. Toggle whether to use the surface geometry or not. Since we created surfaces from the contact points, the layer boundaries in the fence panels can follow the shape of the surfaces. If the surfaces do not exist, or we chose not use use them, the layer boundaries will be straight line segments connecting contact points from drillhole to drillhole.

      3. Choose to show labels. Check Show labels to show labels on all the units on the fence diagram. If they’re “backwards”, you can check Swap direction to change their orientation. You can also set the font properties for the labels.

      4. Click Edit fence to edit the drillholes in the fence, or the layer properties.

      5. Save the fence as a flat 2D image.

   2. Layer properties. In the Contents window, select the second layer, Limestone. In the Properties window, you can:

      1. Toggle the option for Show label. This allows you to show the label for some of the layers, but not all.

      2. Adjust the font properties for the label.

      3. Update the fill pattern and colors.

      4. Update the contact line colors, opacity or width.