Geologists may be required to generate a plot that illustrates the entire mining project in plan view, such as one representing the topography surface.
In this case, the use of a DTM file is not ideal as plots containing surfaces are likely to mask other data required in the plot. We can use the surface and string editing functions in GEOVIA Surpac to extract contours from a topography file for plotting. This method also ensures contours are displayed in a manner suitable for plotting.
The below steps illustrate how this can be done by using the tutorials dataset that comes with the Surpac installation.
- Set your working directory as the folder Tutorials > dtm_surfaces. Open the file named topo1.dtm.
- Select Surfaces > Contouring > Contour DTM in Layer and fill out the form as shown below. Click Apply.
- Once the contouring has been completed, save the string file as blog_contours.str, and close the original DTM file. In the below image, the newly-created string file is displayed with each contour line showing as a different color, which means they have different string numbers. Please note that different colored string lines are not ideal, although they may be plotted.
- Select Edit > String > Renumber range. Fill out the form with String range from 1,32000 and to 30005. Click Apply. Please note that these values will produce the default styles file – you may change these values accordingly.
- The below GUI now displays the strings in the same color and has the elevation shown at intervals along each line. This file is now suitable for plotting.
If you found this post useful, you may also want to read Creating a Topography from Drillhole Data in Surpac, Planes tips or our other posts on Plotting.
