Using the Intercept File Tool for Creating and Editing Veins

Creating a vein using implicit modeling is both straightforward and powerful. Recently, a new tool called the Intercept File has been introduced to provide geologists with a very handy way to handle erratic, narrow veins—especially when numerous underground samples are involved that can sometimes result in unrealistic or unwanted shapes.

Unlike other editing methods, such as guiding your solid with strings, the Intercept File projects the hanging wall (HW) and footwall (FW) contacts and orientations, giving you flexible options to manipulate and edit the model. You can select multiple intercepts at once or work with individual ones to swap between HW and FW or ignore specific intercepts if necessary.

When creating your vein with the Vein Lithology Modeling tool, you can generate an Intercept File that outputs the automatically picked FW/HW contacts and orientations used to build the vein.

You can load this Vein Intercept file from a drop-down menu on the vein toolbar. Based on your preference, you can switch between viewing the model as a Solid Trace or as Oriented Discs, which can be manually modified individually or in groups.

In this example, several underground samples that were causing issues were selected. By applying geological knowledge, their domain assignments were corrected by defining which part they belong to.

After making the necessary edits, save the changes and return to the Modeling form (if it’s still open) to run the tool again. You will see that the vein intercepts you modified are applied, and both the hanging wall and footwall contacts follow the rules you set.

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