Rapid modelling of interactive geological illustrations with faults and compaction

Abstract

In this paper, we propose new methods for building geological illustrations and animations. We focus on allowing geologists to create their subsurface models by means of sketches, to quickly communicate concepts and ideas rather than detailed information. The result of our sketch-based modelling approach is a layer-cake volume representing geological phenomena, where each layer is rock material which has accumulated due to a user-defined depositional event. Internal geological structures can be inspected by different visualization techniques that we employ. Faulting and compaction of rock layers are important processes in geology. They can be modelled and visualized with our technique. Our representation supports non-planar faults that a user may define by means of sketches. Real-time illustrative animations are achieved by our GPU accelerated approach.