How does the Distance to Drillhole Tool work

The  Distance to Drillhole tool release in MMOB 25.5 makes it simple to calculate and display the distance from multiple drillholes to specific wireframes. It can display the distance calculation results in a block model, colouring the wireframe, creating distance buffer shells, or even creating a volume file. 

You'll find the tool on the Drillhole | Calculations ribbon:

When you open the tool, the option panels will change depending on which of the Outputs you have selected. In this example, we have all 4 Outputs chosen so we have panels for configuring each one. I'll show you how "Write distance to wireframes" and how "Create volume file" work, but the other two are straight foward. 

For Distance to Wireframe, we choose the desired wireframe(s) we wish to have calculated. If you choose multiple wireframes, the results will be stored individually for each wireframe. I've chosen to only include drillholes that intersect the target wireframe, which is a simple filtering step. I typed a new wireframe attribute name "DtDH" and chose autoload.

The results are displayed on the wireframe as a heatmap where red indicates short distances and blue is the farthest. 

For the Volume File output, we have to setup the extents for the output. This is easiest to do by clicking the Calculator button in the top-right to have the tool auto-calculate the extents. Then, you need to type a name for a new Volume File, then type a name for the field that will hold the distance calculation results ("DtDH" in our case). As always, checking Auto load will open the volume file after the tool runs. Typing in a numerical value for the Isosurface field will create a shell where the distance is 100 from any drillhole.

Our resulting volume file looks like the below image. We have two vertical cross sections, one horizontal section, and the orange isoshell delineating 100 distance units from the nearest drillhole:

This tool has some great applications when it comes to visualizing your current drilling density and making decisions on where to put more holes.

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