RockWorks/2002 Revision History

2002/Q4 (10/1/01-12/31/01)

New Feature (12/19/02/JPR): A new program called "Polylines -> Planes" has been added to the DirStat / Import menu.  This program reads xyz polyline coordinates from an ASCII file and computes the orientations of planes that pass through these polyline points.

This program is designed for applications in which the user has xyz coordinates that represent the intersections between fractures or contacts and surface topography.  By computing the orientations of planes that pass through these points, it is possible to analyze and/or visualize the relative positions and orientations of these structures.

Polyline -> Planes Options Menu

• Menu Options:
  • Input File:  Tab-delimited ASCII file that contains one or more polygon definitions.  See example below.
  • Estimation Method(s):  Technique used to determine orientation of plane that passes through polyline points.  Note that it is possible to activate both of these methods so that the user may readily compare the results of each method.
    • 3-Points:  Plane orientation computed by fitting a plane to the first polyline point, the last polyline point, and the median polyline point.  The Polyline -> Planes will generate one row of data for each polyline.  This row will include the xyz coordinates for the three aforementioned points.  The resultant triangles may be plotted with the new OpenGL / Triangles program.
      • Color:  Color that will be saved within "Color" column for planes that are calculated via the 3-point method.
    • 1st-Order Polynomial:  Plane orientation computed by fitting a plane to all polyline points.  Unlike the 3-point method, this option computes four triangles (rows of data) for each plane.  The construction of this plane is described below under the heading "Constructing The 1st-Order Polynomial Plane".
      • Color:  Color that will be saved within "Color" column for planes that are calculated via the 1st-order polynomial method.
      • Projection Distance: This is the distance, both up-dip and down-dip, that will be used to determine the overall size of the projected plane (see diagram below).
      • Save Projected Points:  This option will create tab-delimited ASCII files (one for each polyline) that contain the xyz coordinates for the projected points (M,C1,C2,C3, and C4 within the diagram below).
        • File Name Prefix:  Text string to use as a prefix to the polygon names when creating the xyz files.  For example, if a polygon name is "N14J" and the File Name Prefix is set to "Fault", the data will be stored within a file called "Fault_N14J.txt".
  • Output Style:  The orientation of the planes may be computed in one of two ways;
    • Dip Direction:  The data within the Direction/Strike column will represent the dip-direction in a 0 to 360 degree format.  When this option is checked, the title for the direction column will be set to "Dip Direction".
    • Strike:  The data within the Direction/Strike will represent the strike of the plane.  The dip will adhere to the right-hand rule.  When this option is checked, the title for the direction column will be set to "Strike".
  • Decimals:
    • X & Y Coordinates: Number of decimal places used when displaying x (easting) and y (northing) coordinates.
    • Z Coordinates:  Number of decimal places used when displaying z (elevation) units.

Input File: The input format (a RockWare Polyline File) consists of a tab-delimited ASCII file as depicted by the following example;

Tab-delimited polyline file.

Constructing The 1st-Order Polynomial Plane:  The four triangles that comprise the 1st-order polynomial plane is constructed in the following fashion;

• An imaginary line (L0) is drawn from the first polyline point (P1) to the last polyline point (P2).
• Four new imaginary lines (L1 through L4), perpendicular to the aforementioned line, are drawn from the first polyline point (P1) and the last polyline point (P2).  The length of these lines are defined by the "Projection Distance" setting (PD).
• The xy coordinates (C1 through C4) at the ends of these lines (L1 through L4) are then computed.
• The 1st-order polynomial equation is then used to predict the z-coordinates at these endpoints (C1 through C4).
• The xy coordinates for the midpoint (M) between the first (P1) and last (P2) polyline point is computed.
• The 1st-order polynomial equation is then used to predict the z-coordinate for the midpoint (M).
• Four triangles (T1 through T4) and then constructed between the midpoint (M) and the corner points (C1 through C4).

Program Output: Upon completion, the Polylines -> Planes program will generate a table that includes the polyline title, the xyz coordinates for the triangle vertices, and the dip-direction (or strike) and the dip.  Note that the user has the option to export triangles based on either three points or the projected plane.

Sample output from Polylines -> Planes program.

Subsequent Operations: The output from the Polylines -> Planes program may be directly processed by the following programs;

• DirStat / Rose:

Sample output from DirStat / Rose program.

• DirStat/Stereonet:

Sample output from DirStat / Stereonet program.  Note labels depicting polyline titles.

• OpenGL/Triangles:

Sample output from OpenGL / Triangles program.

• Surface Models:

This example was created by gridding three of the output files that were generated by the "Save Projected Points" option.

- Uploaded 12/03/02 -

Bug Fix (12/03/02/JPR):  The previous version would discard zero-thickness stratigraphic intervals in which the contact depth was greater than or equal to total depth.  This has been modified such that the interval will only be skipped if the contact depth is greater than the total depth.

- Uploaded 11/26/02 -

New Feature (11/26/02/JPR): The Utilities / Survey / Downhole Survey / 3D program now includes an option for plotting a reference "cage" around the deviated well diagram.

Bug Fix (11/26/02/JPR): The Utilities / Survey / Downhole Survey / 3D program now creates a diagram.

Bug Fix (11/26/02/MMM): The Utilities / Solid / Math / Model & Model program no longer produces an error whenever the model is plotted within RockPlot/3D (even though the models was properly created).

Improvement (11/26/02/MMM): An extensive help description has been added to the File / Import / Borehole Manager / XLS menu.  The RockPlot/2D / Draw / Options menu now includes an option for filling polygons with a solid color.

New Feature (11/26/02/MIW): The RockPlot/2D / Draw / Options menu now includes an option for filling polygons with a solid color.

Bug Fix (11/26/02/MIW): The colors which are specified within DXF files for both import and export now match more closely within the Windows colors.

Bug Fix (11/26/02/MIW): The text that is created by the RockPlot/2D / File / Import / AGL program now scales correctly when the vertical exaggeration does not equal 1.0.

Bug Fix (11/26/02/MIW); The RockPlot/2D / Utilities / Clip program now adheres to the user specified coordinates instead of recalculating the min/max based on the file contents.  This solves the problem of clipping vertically exaggerated text.

- Uploaded 11/05/02 -

Bug Fix (11/05/02/JPR): The "variable" bargraph coloring scheme within 2D striplogs now works correctly.  The previous version would not plot any colors if the "variable" option was selected.

New Feature (11/05/02/JPR): When creating 2D and 3D striplogs, it is now possible to manually specify the amount of vertical offset (the distance - in depth units - between the top of the log and the base of the title) that is used when plotting the log title.  This provides more control when plotting vertically exaggerated striplogs and cross-sections.

Also: The automatic offsetting works a bit better.

- Uploaded 11/04/02 -

New Feature (11/03/02/JPR): A new import utility titled "XLS" has been added to the File / Import / Into-Borehole-Manager menu.  This program reads the contents of an Excel XLS file and imports the data into RockWorks borehole files. 

Note:

• The format must be EXACTLY the same as that produced by the File / Export / From-Borehole-Manager / XLS program.  The sheet titles must be identical.

• There must be no blank rows within the datasheet.  Otherwise, the import program will stop reading that particular datasheet as soon as a blank row is encountered.

• You do not need to add the extraneous columns (i.e. computed xyz coordinates).

• There is no capability for importing comments.

Bug Fix (11/01/02/JPR):  The File/Export/BH->Excel program now correctly saves the special-pattern data.

New Feature (11/01/02/MIW):  IsoSurfaces within RockPlot/3D no longer redraw until the slider bar is released.  This provides better control when using the slider bar.

New Feature (11/01/02/MIW):  The RockPlot/3D data tree can no be plotted either to the right or the left of the display window.  This is controlled via small "radio buttons" located along the "Linked File List" divider at the base of the data window.

New Feature (10/31/02/JPR): The Solid / Filters / Polygon-Clipping program now displays the "system" polygon table within the options menu.  This means that the table may be examined/edited by simply clicking on the menu item.

Sample Output: Polygon Clipped Solid

New Feature (10/31/02/MIW): The RockPlot/3D program now includes an export option for creating ESRI 3D "Shape" files that can be viewed/imported into ArcScene and 3D-Analyst.  This new utility will export iso-surfaces, elevation grids and well borings.

Boreholes, isosurfaces, and elevation grids displayed within the ESRI ArcScene product.

For more information about this new capability, please refer to the following document:

http://www.rockware.com/support/3Dshapefiles.html

New Feature (10/31/02/MIW): The following special keyboard commands have been added to the RockPlot/3D program;

• Shift + Left-Mouse-Button = Zoom-In

• Right-Mouse-Button = Pan

New Feature (10/31/02/MIW): The View menu within the RockPlot/3D program includes two new options;

    Plan View

        Above: View diagram from a point directly above the model which is oriented such that North is towards the top of the screen.

        Below: View diagram from a point directly above the model which is oriented such that the North is towards the top of the screen.

New Feature (10/30/02/JPR): A new table called the "Color Name Table" has been added to the View / Preferences / Tables list. 

This table contains a list of textual descriptions and their corresponding colors.  These terms (the textual descriptions) may be used by the RCL (RockWare Command Language) TCOLOR command.  It is designed to make it easier to specify colors.  For example,

    Primary Colors Example:

        <COLOR>
            <RED>0</RED>
            <GREEN>0</GREEN>
            <BLUE>255</BLUE>
        </COLOR>

    TCOLOR Example:

        <TCOLOR>PASTEL_GREEN</TCOLOR>

Also ... The TCOLOR command no longer needs to be embedded within the COLOR block.  For backwards compatibility, however, the TCOLOR command may be embedded within the COLOR block.

    Previous Version:

        <COLOR>
            <TCOLOR>MAUVE</TCOLOR>
        </COLOR>

    New Version

        <TCOLOR>PASTEL_BLUE</TCOLOR>    

New Feature (10/30/02/JPR): The following changes have been made to the RCL (RockWare Command Language);

• A new command called "Halt" may now be used to terminate RockWorks.

• The RockWorks program no longer terminates upon completion of the script.  Instead, the new "Halt" command (see item above) must be used to close the program.

Enhancement (10/20/02/JPR): The Geological Utilities / Solid / Filter / Grid Filters / One-Bounding-Grid program has been enhanced such that the user may now perform simple replacement operations in addition to the former multiplication operations.

- Uploaded 10/18/02 -

New Feature (10/18/02/JPR): A new polygon-based editing capability has been added to the Grid-Editor program (located within the Geological Utilities / Grid sub-menu).  This capability will set all of the node values within a  specified polygonal region to a user-specified value.

The following diagram illustrates some of the capabilities of this new polygon-based editor;

Cosmetic (10/17/02/JPR): The RockPlot2D/File/Export/WMF program now erases the status bar once the file has been saved.

Bug Fix (10/16/02/JPR): The "Regular Spacing" option within the Solid Modeling menus now works correctly.  The previous version would ignore this setting and always use the original control points.

New Feature (10/16/02/JPR):  New point searching options have been added to the solid modeling IDW (Inverse Distance Weighting) algorithm.

These search options allow the user to minimize the effects of clustered data points (e.g. closely spaced points within widely separated drill holes).

New Feature (10/15/02/JPR): A new program has been added for importing cone penetrometer data from a Spectrum Technologies "Field Scout" SC900 Soil Compaction Meter.

This program creates borehole files and stores the penetrometer data within the "geophysics" data tab.

Enhancement (10/15/02/JPR): When plotting 3D geochemical logs in which the geochemical magnitude is portrayed as cylinders, zero-magnitude intervals are now visible as thin lines.  The previous version would not (correctly) plot anything.  The latest version plots a very thin line so that the viewer can see the differences between intervals that were sampled and those that weren't.

Bug Fix (10/10/02/JPR): The Geological-Utilities/Grid/Edit program now plots control points correctly if the upper-left corner of the diagram does not represent the northwest corner of the project area (i.e. the user has scrolled either right or down).

Bug Fix (10/10/02/JPR): The Geological-Utilities/Grid/Edit program now plots contours correctly if the upper-left corner of the diagram does not represent the northwest corner of the project area (i.e. the user has scrolled either right or down).

Bug Fix (10/06/02/JPR): The annotation within histograms (used by a variety of programs such as Stats/Histogram, Grid/Stats/Histogram, Solid/Stats/Histogram, etc.) has been improved such that text no longer overplots other text if the font is set to a large size.

New Feature (10/02/02/JPR): A new program called "Minimum Area" has been added to the Geological-Utilities/Grid/Filters menu.  This program will take either a boolean of a conventional grid model and evaluate contiguous cells that exceed a user-defined area.  If the area of a group of contiguous cells is less than a user-defined threshold, the nodes will be set to zero.  This provides a means for eliminating exploration targets that are too small.

New Feature (10/02/02/JPR): A new program called "Grids -> 3D Stack" has been added to the Geological-Utilities/Grid menu.  In order to use this program you must first create a list of grid names within the datasheet.  This program is used to plot multiple flat grids in 3D space for the purpose of visual comparisons.

The following diagram depicts five stacked grid models.  The RockPlot/3D data tree will allow you to turn individual grids on and off.

New Feature (10/02/02/JPR): A new program called "Multivariate Anomalies" has been added to the Geological-Utilities/Grid/Statistics menu.  The purpose of this program is to provide an exploration tool when dealing with multiple spatial data sets.

Given a list of grid models and weighting factors (see next figure), the program performs the following operations;

For each grid;

• The mean and standard deviation for all grid nodes are computed.

• The node values are redefined in terms of standard deviations.  For example, a node value of 1.7 means that the original node value is 1.7 standard deviations above the mean.

• All node values are then redefined to be in terms of absolute values.  For example, a node value of -1.9 becomes 1.9.

• Each of the node values are then multiplied by the user-defined weighting factor.

These standardized/filtered grids are then added together.  The final grid (specified within the Multivariate Anomalies menu) is then subjected to the following process.

• The mean and standard deviation for all grid nodes are computed.

• The node values are redefined in terms of standard deviations.

• All node values are then redefined to be in terms of absolute values.

• All node values less than 1.0 are converted to zero.

Note:

• All grids must have the same dimensions.

• If the weighting factor is omitted, program assumes that the weighting factor is 1.0.

• In order for this technique to work, sufficient non-anomalous data must be included (i.e. the project area must be large enough to generate sufficient background levels).

New Feature (10/02/02/JPR): All programs that generate grid models (e.g. stratigraphy, hydrology) now include options for smoothing the grid model(s).

New Feature (10/02/02/JPR): The Geological-Utilities/Grid/Filters/Standardize program has new options that will automatically compute the absolute values of the deviations and filter out non-anomalous values.

Bug Fix (10/02/02/JPR): The Geological-Utilities/Survey/Setup-XY-Stations will add new rows to the datasheet if necessary.

New Feature (10/01/02/JPR): A new item called "RockPlot3D" has been added to the RockPlot/2D/Export menu.  This program will either "float" or "drape" the contents of a RKW (RockWorks 2D graphic file) and display it within the RockPlot/3D program.

Examples:

Section Map Draped Over 3D Surface

Rose Diagram Draped Over 3D Surface

Contours Draped Over 3D Surface

New Feature (10/01/02/JPR): A new program called "Rounding Filter" has been added to the Geological-Utilities/Solid/Filter menu.  This program will round the solid model nodes to the closest, user-defined interval.

New Feature (10/01/02/JPR): A new program called "Describe Rock" has been added to the Geological-Utilities/Util menu.  This program is designed to help users who are describing rocks by presenting a checklist of things to look for.  As items are selected from this checklist, a description is constructed and saved, dynamically, within the Windows clipboard.  At any stage, this description may be pasted into other applications (e.g. Microsoft Word).  The "pick list" may (and should) be edited by selecting the "Edit Pick List" option at the base of the menu.