Tips for Working with Polygons in GEMS

It’s Tip Tuesday. Today’s post comes from one of our Consulting Geologists, Josilene Carvalho.

The powerful polygons tool found in GEOVIA GEMS™ offers many procedures to create and configure polygons. Knowing how to properly use this tool enables greater efficiency in the activities of:

  • Drawing areas for reserve reports
  • Drawing sections and geological maps
  • Improve your grade control
  • Drawing area for cut and blast design

There are many ways to display the polygons, depending on how the Layers and Layer Groups are set. Geometry Rules is one set of four rules to build polygons. With these rules, GEMS can build and close polygons by using polygons of another layer. Geometry Rules enables users to:

  • Set the attributes for the new polygons to use, by changing the stacking order of the Layer
  • Design new polygons using attributes of the upper layer
  • Set up a rule on many layers in a Layer Group

Here are some helpful tips and facts when using Geometry Rules

1. When building polygons, click on “create<apply rules” to apply the rules to all active polygons. Note: To make the process quicker, select only the polygon(s) that will be worked on, as opposed to load all polygons.

2. Using the Polygon menu, select commands to load and unload polygons. Note: This can be completed for either the current plain or several, all at once.

How load and unload polygons.

3. Sometimes errors may occur and GEMS can’t close all the polygons. The most common causes of a polygon failure are:

  • A polygon has a gap between two of its nodes
  • It has a line segment that does not join up with any other line segment
  • Areas that are overlapping and therefore form very small polygons

Window showing that there is an error.

In general, these errors are very small and it can be hard to identify where it happened. However, GEMS creates a reference image (polygon.ggp or polyinfo.ggp) to help find the error. To view .GGP files, go to View > Reference Image and list and select the files to display.

Sample *.ggp file of small polygons.

Hope these tips will be of help to you when working with Polygons in GEMS. Click here for more GEMS Tips.

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When mining companies seek to increase mine productivity, they turn to Dassault Systèmes for technology and services. It is home to world-renowned and award-winning mining solutions and to industry thought leaders who are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in mining, through the GEOVIA brand. The largest global supplier of mining software, GEOVIA delivers comprehensive solutions in all major mining centers in more than 130 countries at over 4,000 sites.
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