![]() ![]() ![]() Whether your audience includes joint venture partners, potential investors or local townsfolk, they’re unlikely to have used 3-D modelling software and probably don’t have the 3-D acuity to mentally picture a printed plan or cross section in 3-D.įor example the image in Figure 2 will have a far greater impact on a non-technical person than an ordinary map of the same area. Pretty pictures and fly-through animationsĬommunicating complex spatial ideas to non-technical audiences is an important part of mineral exploration. Uses for satellite (and other) imageryįollowing are some of the ways you can use satellite (or other) imagery within Micromine, which I used to produce all of the screenshots shown here. Although DTMs are most often used for elevations, they are also used for tangible subsurface features like fault planes and abstract surfaces like gridded geochemical values. In the GIS world it would be called a TIN (triangulated irregular network). TIP: In Micromine a “DTM” describes a triangulated surface where there is only ever one Z-value at any X-Y location. Subsurface data is nearly always true 3-D because its geometry is too complex to represent with a single elevation. Another way to think of it is that a 2.5-D object has a constant elevation, whereas a 3-D object may have varying elevations. ![]() TIP: “2.5-D” (two-and-a-half dimensional) indicates data where elevation is an attribute with true 3-D data elevation is part of the geometry. However, it’s equally useful aboveground: many surface features are more easily understood in a perspective view, some GIS formats are natively 3-D, and existing 2-D data is readily converted to 2.5- or 3-D by draping it onto a digital terrain model (DTM) to assign new elevations. Micromine is not designed for true GIS analyses like intervisibility/viewshed analysis, image classification or network analysis.įigure 1: A Micromine Vizex perspective view (looking horizontally) showing surface geology (at top), interpreted geological sections and modelled gravity (at bottom)Īlways working in 3-D provides the flexibility to interactively view your data from any direction (Figure 1), which becomes increasingly important when you acquire subsurface information via drilling or excavation.Micromine’s viewing environment, known as Vizex, always treats the data as 3-D, even for traditionally “flat” 2-D views such as maps or plans.However, it differs from a GIS in a couple of ways: From a mineral exploration perspective it looks a lot like a GIS: it supports many of the same raster and vector formats, uses the same multi-layered approach to building a display, and has the same toolbox-oriented menu structure as a typical GIS. Micromine is used for mineral exploration, geological and resource modelling, and mine planning and production. In response I’ve included a list of published books and papers at the end of this post. Side-note: Mineral exploration remote sensing referencesĪ few people asked for specific references on image processing techniques for mineral exploration after Parts 1 and 2 were published. In this part I’ll show you how to use the imagery within Micromine. In Parts 1, 2 and 3 of this blog I showed you how to obtain and process satellite imagery, focusing on free Landsat data and free and open source software. BappSc (Applied Geology) PGradDip (GIS & RS) ![]()
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