RockWorks Revision History

RockWorks/16 Revision History
2014/Q4 (10/01/14-12/31/14)

(070) Bug Fix (12/16/14/MIW): The Statistics / Sieve Diagram program no longer generates an I/O Error #105.

(069) Bug Fix (12/16/14/MIW): The RockPlot2D ShapeFile export program now set the z-value for contour lines.

(068) New Feature (12/16/14/JCJ): The Borehole Manager / File / Check Data Integrity program now includes an option to check and report depth gaps and overlaps.

(067) New Feature (12/17/14/JPR): A new algorithm titled "Highest Probability" has been added to the Solid Modeling Options menu.

The algorithm starts by building a table of all unique g-values encountered within the control points. For each of these g-values, a probablity model is created based on the inverse-square law (probability is
inversely proportional to the square of the distance). The program then assigns the final node values based on the g-value with the highest probability.

Note: Although this program is designed primary for lithologic modeling, it may also be used with other types of data with the caveat that the processing time increases with the number of unique g-values.

As shown by the example above, the models produced by the Highest Probability algorithm are very similar to those produced by the Lateral Extrusion / Simple algorithm. Unfortunately, the Highest Probability method is 68x slower but more statistically rigorous than the Lateral Extrusion / Simple algorithm.

The Distance cutoff filters will eliminate probability computations when a control point is beyond the specified cutoff. These filters can also significantly reduce the amount of time required to process the data. For example, when estimating the probabilities for a given voxel, the vertical filter will limit the control points to those within a horizontal layer that is centered on the voxel.

(066) Improvement (12/12/14/JPR): The Block Modeling programs now display meaningful error message if faulting is enabled but the fault file does not exist.

(065) Improvement (12/12/14/JCJ): The DataSheet CSV and Text import programs now allow the user to select if the header contains one or two lines.

(064) Improvement (12/11/14/JPR): The Lateral Extrusion / Simple algorithm now extrudes to the midpoints between all boreholes rather than half the distance to the closest borehole. In addition, the program now runs six times faster.

The previous version extruded borehole lithologies to 50% of the distance to the closest neighboring lateral point. The problem with this approach is clustered boreholes. For example, in the diagram below, Borehole-A is 10 meters from Borehole-B. In the first pass of the algorithm, the lithologies for Borehole-A will be extruded 5 meters laterally. Borehole-C is 100 meters from it's closest neighbor (Borehole-A) so it's lithologies will be extruded 50 meters. The lithologies within the undefined region will then be extruded from the midpoints of the undefined regions towards the defined voxels.

The latest versions assigns points only to their enclosing voxel. As with the other approach, the lithologies within the much-larger undefined region will then be extruded from the midpoints of the undefined regions towards the defined voxels. As a consequence, the midpoint of the undefined region is much closer to the true midpoint and the second pass will create an interpolation that is less biased towards Borehole-C.

(063) Bug Fix (12/11/14/JCJ): It is now possible to open RwDat files in which the thousand separators are spaces.

(062) Bug Fix (12/11/14/JCJ): Thousand separators (e.g. ",") within the numeric values that are added via the math operations within the Borehole Manager / Edit-As-Datasheet optios are now automatically removed when saving the data.

(061) Bug Fix (12/11/14/JCJ): The Survey Inclination Axis Orientation - Option #3 - Positively from the horizontal (+90° = straight down) now works correctly. In the previous version, RockWorks was incorrectly assuming this option was just a further clockwise rotation of 90° from option 2, placing 0° horizontally to the left verses 0° being to the right as the diagram shows. RockWorks will now interpret this correctly with +90° = straight down and 0° horizontally to the right (counter-clockwise as positive angles).

The LogPlot and LAS imports gave the user an ability to transform angles on import of data, these have also been corrected for this change.

(060) Cosmetic (12/11/14/MIW): An unused item "P-Data #1 - Border" has been removed from the 2D striplog design menu.

(059) Bug Fix (12/11/14/MIW): Clipping 2D boreholes now plots the log axis to the full extents of the clipping boundaries.

(058) Bug Fix (12/08/14/MIW): Outputting a ReportWorks page at high resolution no longer causes the RockPlot/2D layers to be plotted opaquely thereby causing only the last layer to be visible.

(057) Bug Fix (12/08/14/MIW): The RockPlot3D program now saves the Lighting settings.

(056) Bug Fix (12/08/14/MIW): Cutouts within RockPlot3D iso-surfaces are now indexed correctly thereby eliminating strange graphical artifacts on the outer surface (non-clipped) portions of models.

(055) Bug Fix (11/25/14/MIW): The Utilities / Map / Grid-Based Map program now honors the Right Hand Rule setting when using dip data.

(050-054) Bug Fixes & New Features (11/25/14/JCJ): The following changes have been made to the multi-file LAS importer:

(050) Point Types are now parsed correctly.
(051) If the checkbox labeled "Add curves if they do not exist." is unchecked, new curves will not be added to the database.
(052) The list of curves now has a right-click menu to add and delete curve mnemonics.
(053) Curve mnemonics can also be deleted by clicking on the item and dragging them out of the list.
(054) The import process may now be cancelled.

(041-049) Improvements (11/20/14/JPR): When initially displayed, the following menus display file names using a convention whereby the path portion of a file name is truncated with periods such that the file name can fit within the allotted space. For example, a long file name like "C:\Users\Mortimer_Snerd\Acme_Minerals\Documents\Projects\Nevada21\Surface.grd" might appear as "C:\...\Nevada21\Surface.grd". If the user clicks on the file name, the long version of the name will be displayed such that it can be edited.

Additionally, the dialog that opens up if the user clicks on the file-open icon will now show a more descriptive title such as "Select Existing Warping Grid ..." rather than just "Open".

If a file path is outside of the project folder, the file name will appear in red with a yellow background as a warning that it's not a good idea to have files outside of your project folder.

The following menus have been changed accordingly:

(041) AGS Import (Input File, Template)
(042) 3D Points (Connector Elevation Grid)
(043) Background Image (Image, World File)
(044) LogPlot Import Wizard (Data Template & LogPlot Keywords)
(045) Solid Modeling (Fault File, Polygon File, Lower Grid, Upper Grid, Warping Grid)
(046) Solid Smoothing (Surface Grid, Warping Grid)
(047) Surface Profile (Surface Grid)
(048) Symbol Editor / Move
(049) Text File Import Wizard (Input File and Template)

(040) Cosmetic (11/16/14/JPR): The Utilities / Map / Grid-Based Map option has been split into two separate programs in order to de-clutter the generic gridding menu. Specifically, there's a menu for just gridding XYZ data and another menu for gridding XYZ,Dip-Direction,Dip-Angle data.

Note: If you're gridding XYZ,Dip-Direction,Dip-Angle data, be sure to check the "Dip" algorithm button within the Grid-Options menu.

(039) New Feature (11/16/14/JPR): The Decluster option within the gridding options dialog has been completely redesigned. Specifically, the program now uses a fast "quadtree" algorithm to remove duplicate points and to de-cluster clustered points. This method essentially creates a temporary grid in which a rectangle enclosing the control points is recursively subdivided into quadrants that contain control points until they are smaller than the specified maximimum cell size. The program then looks for multiple occurances of control points within each of these cells and replaces these control points with a single point based on the user-specified declustering method. The is typically no speed benefits when declustering points for gridding (see example below). Instead, the advantages are geared toward minimizing the influence of clustered points and eliminating the duplicates.

(038) New Feature (11/16/14/JPR): The Decluster option within the block-modeling dialog has been completely redesigned. Specifically, the program now uses a fast "octree" algorithm to remove duplicate points and to de-cluster clustered points. This method essentially creates a temporary block model in which a parallelopiped enclosing the control points is recursively subdivided into octants that contain control points until they are smaller than the specified maximum voxel size. The program then looks for multiple occurances of control points within each of these voxels and replaces these control points with a single point based on the user-specified declustering method.

The declustering methods are described as follows:

Average: The average G-value for all points within a voxel.
Closest Point: The G-value for the point that is closest to the voxel midpoint. Recommended for modeling color and lithology.
Distance Weighted: The estimated G-value based on an inverse-distance-squared weighting algorithm. Recommended for modeling most data sets except for color and lithology.
Highest: The highest G-value for all points that reside within a voxel.
Lowest: The lowest G-Value for all points that reside within a voxel.

The Horizontal Resolution defines the declustering voxel x-size and y-size as a function of the specified project dimensions. For example, if the Horizontal Resolution is set to 50% (the default) and the x-spacing for the project model is 100', the horizontal size of a declustering voxel will be 50'.

The Vertical Resolution defines the declustering voxel height as a function of the specified project dimensions. For example, if the Vertical Resolution is set to 50% (the default) and the z-spacing for the project model is 2 meters, the vertical size of a declustering voxel will be 1 meter.

The Show Report option will display a dialog box (shown below) that summarizes how many points were consolidated via the declustering process.

In addition, this dialog provides an option to copy the declustered points to the RockWorks Utilities Datasheet (see below).

This data may be plotted in 3D by using the Utilities / Map / 3D-Points program (see below) to examine the effects of various declustering methods and resolution settings.

Additional Notes:

As shown by the examples above, the declustering can speed up the processing by more than 50% (half the time!).
Creating declustering voxels that are more than 50% of the project model voxel dimensions is not as because we're beginning to encounter a "point of diminshed return" because the declustering is spending more time consolidating the points that reside within the declustering voxels. That's why we don't recommend declustering resolutions greater than 50% - you're just losing accuracy and there's no speed benefit.
Declustering is turned on by default and set to the Closest Point method with a horizontal resolution of 50% and a vertical resolution of 50%.
Although the dimensions of the temporary voxels are based the project dimensions node spacing, the octree model extents may extend the project dimensions in order to accommodate control points that reside outside the project dimensions.
In addition to handling clustered points, the declustering will eliminate any duplicate points that are passed to the modeling algorithm. This is important because some of the modeling algorithms handle duplicate points poorly (i.e. producing divide-by-zero error messages).
Data sets that are uniformly distributed do not gain a speed benefit from de-clustering. In fact, the de-clustering may actually slows down the processing. For example, a data set with 50,000 randomly distributed control points (see below) required 330 seconds without declustering and 340 seconds (3% slower) with declustering.

(037) Enhancement (11/12/14/MIW): A default view is now added to every RockPlot3D scene to reset the view to the default settings.

(036) Bug Fix (11/12/14/MIW): Incorrectly formatted colors will no longer cause RockPlot2D to issue a range-check error and close. Instead, all colors are automatically "masked" to insure the correct format.

(035) Improvement (11/11/14/JCJ): The Check Data Integrity report now allows a means to check the Total Depths without changing them and the results will be added to the text file.

(034) Bug Fix (11/06/14/JCJ): The Borehole Manager Move and Rename utilities have been updated to circumvent the EOSError exception (System Error Code #32).

(033) Bug Fix (11/04/14/JCJ): The Utilities / File / Recent option now shows more than one recent file. Any RwDat file that has been opened will be added to the list.

(032) Bug Fix (11/04/14/JCJ): The Utilities / File / CSV / Text import program now extracts titles correctly.

(031) New Feature (10/30/14/JPR): The block model smoothing dialog that is used by a variety of RockWorks programs now includes an option for automatically setting the filter dimensions.

The new Automatic setting will set the radius of the search cylinder to 150% of the model x-spacing and 150% of the model z-spacing.

(027-030) Cosmetic (10/28/14/JPR): The RockPlot3D / Voxel-Display / Options menu has been enhanced as follows:

(027) The Plot Outline option has been removed from group box and centered below the Fill menu.
(028) The "Enabled" option has been removed. Instead the Filter group now has a checkbox.
(029) The "Show Volume" option has been moved below the Filter slider controls.
(030) The slider controls are prettier and now support the PgUp and PgDn keys to move in larger increments.

(026) Cosmetic (10/28/14/MIW): Plotting a 2D grid with equal z-values no longer causes errors with color contouring and color legends. The range is now expanded to 20 (+/-10) when all values are equal.

(024-025) New Feature (10/27/14/JPR): The RockPlot3D / Lighting menu has been enhanced as follows:

(024) The slider bars for Ambient and Diffuse lighting now shows the relative percentages at the base of each slider.
(025) A series of "Presets" have been added to the menu for automatically adjusting the slider bars based on descriptive terminology.

(023) New Feature (10/23/14/JPR): A new program titled "3-Dimensional Lineations" has been added to the Utilities / Linears / Lineation Properties menu.

This program is used to compute the following items for one or more lineations as defined by XYZ endpoints:

Bearing (0-360 degrees) from Point #1 to Point #2.
Bi-Directional Bearing: Azimuth from from Point #1 to Point #2 (if less than 180-degrees) otherwise bearing from Point #2 to Point #1.
Length: Three-dimensional distance between points.
Horizontal Distance: Horizontal distance between points.
Vertical Distance: Vertical distance between points.
Midpoint: XYZ coordinates for midpoint between points.

(022) New Feature (10/23/14/JPR): The Preferences / General Program Settings / Borehole Orientations menu now includes a group of options to fine-tune how the program converts depths to XYZ coordinates.

RockWorks interpolates XYZ points at regular intervals down the hole based on the downhold azimuth/inclination data in order to create a 3-dimensional polyline. This is only performed once unless the downhole survey data is changed or if the user selects the Borehole Manager / Edit / Calculate XYZ Values For All Boreholes or Calculate XYZ Values For Current Borehole options.

This 3D polyline is then used to determine the xyz coordinates for downhole data by performing a weighted average of the closest polyline point above and the closest polyline point below the depth in question. In previous versions, the spacing between the points within the 3D polyline was determined by taking the diagonal distance from the lower-southwest and upper-northeast corners of the project area and dividing by 500. For example, if the project is 1000 x 1000 x 1000 meters, the distance between the opposite corner-points will be 1,735 meters. Dividing this distance by 500 yields a 3D polyline point spacing of 3.5 meters.

The new options shown below provide a means to fine-tune or override the default distance increment computation:

(021) Bug Fix (10/20/14/JPR): The program now stores the proper World File name when selecting a background image in which the World File is manually specified.

(016-020) New Features (10/20/14/JPR):

(016-019): The same changes described below (Item # 012-015) have been applied to the Project Folder / Project Notes menu option that is used to edit the Project Notes in a stand-alone dialog.
(020): The Project Notes editor dialog now defaults to fill the entire screen.

(012-015) New Features (10/20/14/JPR): Several new features have been added to the popup-menu that appears when the user right-clicks withing the Project Notes:

(012) The new Font option provides a variety of tools for changing the font type, color, size, etc. for the currently highlighted text (see Item A below).
(013) The new Numbering option is used create bullet-point lists (see Item B below).
(014) The new Paragraph option is used to define the justification, margins, and line spacing for a selected block of text (see Item C below).
(015) The Control-Z key combination may now be used to undo up to the last 100 operations.

(011) New Feature (10/12/14/JPR): The smoothing options within the Utilities / Solid / Filters / Smoothing Filter menu have been extended to those described for Item #008 (below).

(010) New Feature (10/12/14/JPR): The smoothing options within the Borehole Manager / Fractures / Model menu have been extended to those described for Item #008 (below).

(009) New Feature (10/12/14/JPR): The smoothing options within the Borehole Manager / Vectors / Model menu have been extended to those described for Item #008 (below).

(008) New Feature (10/12/14/JPR): The smoothing options within the Solid Modeling Options menu (used by many programs) has been improved as follows;

Filter dimensions are now used to define the dimensions of a search cylinder, rather than a "box filter".
A warping surface may now be used to tilt the search cylinder such that
Filter dimensions may now be expressed in decimal units (e.g. X-Size = 1.5 voxels).

Unfortunately, all of this comes at a price: The new smoothing algorithm is slower than previous versions.

(007) Bug Fix (10/08/14/JPR): The Utilities / Map / EZ-Map program now correctly uses the Contours / Skip Low Values and Skip High Values settings. The previous version ignored the Skip High Values altogether and plotted one unlabeled contour one-interval below the Skip Low Value cutoff.

(006) Bug Fix (10/08/14/JPR): The programs listed below now correctly convert volume and mass to the output units specified within at the base of the main RockWorks menu. The previous version would change the labeling but not the actual numbers.

Borehole Manager / Lithology / Model
Borehole Manager / Lithology / Volumetrics
Borehole Manager / Stratigraphy / Model
Borehole Manager / Stratigraphy / Volumetrics

(005) Improvement (10/01/14/JCJ): The "Export to Utilities Datasheet" option within the Lithology and Stratigraphy types manager now exports the patterns and sets the Datasheet column to show the patterns.

(004) Improvement (10/01/14/JCJ): The "Export to Utilities Datasheet" option within the Lithology and Stratigraphy types manager now sets the density field column to the designated density units.

(003) Improvement (10/01/14/JCJ): The "Edit As Datasheet" options within the Borehole Manager data management tabs now sets the Pattern, Color and Symbol columns within the datasheet if appropriate.

(002) New Feature (10/01/14/JPR): The Smoothing option within the block modeling menu now includes Lowest-G and Highest-G settings that are described within the previous modification (#001).

(001) New Feature (10/01/14/JPR): The Utilities / Solid / Filters / Smoothing Filter program now includes options for resolving "ties" when using the classification method.

This new capability determines how RockWorks resolves instances in which a smoothing region contains an equal number of different voxels. For example, let's say that you're smoothing a lithology model in which clay is represented by a g-value of 0.0, gravel is represented by a g-value of 1.0, and sand is represented by a g-value of 2.0. Given a filter size of 1x1 (27 voxels), there could be an instance where the filter parallelopid contains 1 clay voxel, 18 gravel voxels, and 18 sand voxels. If the "Tie Breaking Method" is set to "Use Lowest G-Value", the smoothed voxel will be assigned a value of 1.0 (gravel). Conversely, if the Tie Breaking Method is set to Use Highest Value, the smoothed voxel will be assigned a value of 2.0 (sand).

In Example A (below), the silt (g=3) region is smaller when using the Highest-G setting because the surrounding material (sand) has a higher g-value (g=4). Conversely, the silt region is slightly larger when using the Lowest-G setting.

In Example B (below), the soil (g=1) region is smaller when using the Highest-G setting because the surrounding material (sand) has a higher g-value (g=4) whereas the soil region is larger when using the Lowest-G setting.

Note: The tie-breaking methodology only applies to the classification smoothing.