MineSight at your Surface

Tips for Solving Tricky Surface Issues

 Issues we all encounter
Self-
Duplicate
Intersecting
faces
faces

Openings Interior walls

Non-orientable
surfaces
 What can cause these issues?
Incorrect Merging
• Coincident & Coplanar faces
• Linking thin & dense data
• Not fully intersecting surfaces

Triangulating bad contour lines

Hastily done repairs

Not examining & verifying results
 Potential Problems
Inaccurate reserves
• May not know until it’s too late

Precision issues
• Slices & Contours can be broken or not accurately
representative
• Can’t use these in MSIP without repairs

Tough to tell where or when issues

started
“Infect” other surfaces
This all takes time & resources to fix
 Tools to help
Surface 
MineSight Contour Tool &
Simplify 
Data Manager Slice View
Decimate

Verify Tool Surface 

Delete Face Volume Clipping

Linker Tool Surface 

Size Parameters

LGO views
 Essential steps
Keep a copy
• Always have a backup of your current and past surfaces to refer to

Simplify the surface

• Removing near coplanar faces properly can greatly improve the
behavior of a surface, but the difference can rarely be noticed

Verify the surface

• Check the integrity of a surface/solid and repair issues

Locate problematic areas

• Know where changes are going to be made and what is being done
Non-orientable surface (Mobius Strip)
These cannot be used,
for anything
 Decimate It!
Sounds harsh, but it has to be done
Co-planar and near co-planar faces need to be removed

This alone can repair a non-orientable surface

Increase the effectiveness of repairs made by the Verify Tool

With a small tolerance for offset distance, the difference is

negligible (≤ 0.001)

A surface is like anything, more pieces mean more places for

things to go wrong
Surface with a Mobius strip
Faces removed with decimate
 Where are the problems???
Highlights can be difficult to see
Turn off object visibility

• MineSight Data Manager  Light bulb icon

Turn off selection highlighting

• Selection  Properties  no highlighting

Change Highlight colors to contrast

• Viewer  Preferences
• Save color preferences to be used for any project

Convert Verify highlights to Virtual Elements or Geometry

• Keep as reference after the tool is closed

 Verify Tool
Identify, Locate, & Repair surface issues
Use on input & output surfaces
• Surfaces & Solids should be verified before & after use with any
operation

Do not repair blindly

• Locate the area
• Assess the severity
• Make repairs, manually if complicated

Recurring issues in the same area  Amputate

• Use Delete face to remove problematic faces, or clip with a polygon

If you have to repair self-intersecting faces

more than twice, Decimate again
Know where your data comes from and what was
done with it
Try to match the data you make with what you’ve
got
 Area with non-orientable surfaces

The closer you zoom the more miniscule triangles you will see
Simpler input yields simpler results, but this doesn’t
look so simple
You can’t increase the precision of existing data without resurveying
• If you are handed something like this, you will have to make it work.

Certain repairs can cause further corruption on such a small scale

• With so many small triangles so thin and close together it can be difficult to
determine how automatic repairs may be handled.

A small area could just be deleted

• Sometimes you have to cut off a toe to save the foot, and you have to save
the foot to save yourself.

Digitize denser data

• The main issue is that one side has far fewer points to connect to. Densify
your polylines.
 LGO: Large Gridded Object
Far less memory taken up in an LGO view than triangulated geometry
• Speed up your project and workflow.

Multiple surfaces stored in one file

• Track the progression of your mine’s topography with everything in one

place.

No surface issues to verify for

• Since an LGO is essentially a list of points to be treated as a surface, those

issues are literally impossible.

Import from geometry, ASCII, or existing LGO

• Grid the top or bottom of a surface geometry to get rid of all issues. Then
easily convert back to geometry, if desired.
 LGO: More features
Adjust Memory consumption on the fly
• Limit Range and Thin display points
• Display as Surface or Polylines
• Test Memory Usage

Tools in the View

• Intersect & Merge Surfaces
• Isopachs

Customizable upon creation

• Specify origin, incline, size, spacing, azimuth, and dip
 Original Surface Geometry

44,821K
LGO View: Surface display

2K
LGO View: Polyline Display
15m x 15m
 LGO open surfaces only
True, but here’s what we can do
LGO the top and bottom, then link them

• If you have a uniform seam with fairly vertical sides.

Contour the solid then link the polygons

• Before linking, the polygons should be inspected to make sure

more issues are not created.

Delete some faces

• If the problematic area can be identified and located, this is the

quickest fix.
• Clip out the problem section, grid it, merge it back in.
 Interior Faces
Ever had this,

And gotten this?

 If these walls are separate elements
Select all surfaces as one group and use “Return Union Of Solids”
to get a solid without interior walls.
 Preview

Apply
Only one surface left,
but it needs to be verified
 Planar Interior Walls
When interior walls are a planar
surface they are very manageable

• Identify where the walls are

• Snap an Edit grid to this plane as a reference
• Delete the interior faces
 Deleting just Interior Walls

First select more faces than you want

• Activate Surface  Delete Face

• Draw a box to select all faces on the Edit Grid’s
plane and just to either side
 Deleting just Interior Walls
Unselect Faces to Keep

• Hold shift & draw thin box on either side of the edit grid
 Deleting just Interior Walls
Right click to delete faces & again to end the function

Check results with Volume Clipping

What you want to see from the Verify Tool
Questions???