We have been pondering how to visualize planes in 3D as a way to assess correlation of beds in an area. My colleague Chris Campisano and our jointly supervised PhD student Dominique Garello was asking about this for a while. We discussed a few solutions, including the MOVE suite and RIMS among others. I know there is a lot of software out there for this.
I decided to tackle it in a very simple way with the constraint that it would only use Excel and ArcGIS (ArcMap and ArcScene). I googled around an there was not an obvious solution already.
The basic steps:
- Produce a disc in MS Excel by creating a circle with a specified diameter and center. Rotate the dip around N-S axis and then rotate around vertical to apply the strike (then make it the correct size and translate to correct center)
- Load the rim points into ArcMap, view the X Y points with elevations
- Create a TIN (triangulate the rim points to make the disk)
- Visualize it in ArcScene