Inquiry on extracting continuous dip and dip-direction fields from GemPy models

[OUCTAOSHU]

Dear GemPy Development Team,

I hope this message finds you well.

My name is Tao, and I am currently working on regional geological modeling using GemPy. I have been very impressed by GemPy’s powerful implicit modeling framework and its ability to integrate structural data into coherent 3D geological models.

I am writing to seek your guidance regarding a specific question. In my current research, I aim to use GemPy not only to build geological models but also to derive a spatially continuous field of structural orientation information, specifically dip and dip direction, across the modeled geological domain (for example, along geological surfaces or throughout the voxel grid).

I would like to ask whether GemPy currently provides a way to extract or compute such continuous orientation information from the scalar field or model solutions. If this is feasible, I would be very grateful if you could kindly suggest a general approach or workflow to achieve this.

Thank you very much for your time and for developing such an outstanding tool for the geoscience community. I truly appreciate your support and guidance.

Best regards,
Tao

[OUCTAOSHU]

This is the geological model I built. Ultimately, I want to generate a continuous surface geological information TIFF file. I'm wondering if this is possible.

[javoha]

Hi @OUCTAOSHU,

thanks for sharing this great looking model. It is always nice to see people using GemPy for different settings.

Regarding your questions:

a) Orientations:
In it#s current version I do not think that GemPy computes orientations (I will double check later). You can however use np.gradient (https://numpy.org/doc/2.4/reference/generated/numpy.gradient.html) pretty straightforward to compute gradients from the scalar fields that GemPy stores. You can also use that to intertpolate gradients for your surface meshes (let me know if you are interested in the code for that.

b) TIFF
GemPy does not support that but I am very sure that creating such a TIFF file with the information that GemPy provides should be possible with some other packages. I will try to take a look and see if I find a good option.

Cheers,
Jan

[OUCTAOSHU]

Hi @javoha,
Thank you very much for your helpful explanation and clarification.
I understand that the current version of GemPy does not directly compute orientation data. Your suggestion to use np.gradient to derive gradients from the scalar field stored in GemPy is very insightful and aligns well with my objective of obtaining continuous orientation information.

I would greatly appreciate it if you could kindly provide an example or relevant code demonstrating how to compute the gradient from the scalar field and interpolate it onto the surface mesh. This would be extremely helpful for my work, as I aim to generate spatially continuous dip and dip direction information.

Thank you again for your time and support. I truly appreciate your help and the excellent work you and your team have done in developing GemPy.

I look forward to your guidance.
Kind regards,
Tao

[AlexanderJuestel]

Have a look here: https://github.com/cgre-aachen/gemgis_data/blob/main/notebooks/02_planar_dipping_layers/example01_planar_dipping_layers.ipynb