How can I keep selected intervals within vein when choosing a minimum thickness?
As I wish to model to a minimum thickness, I must turn off snapping to the hangingwall and/or footwall, or the vein thickness may shrink below my specified minimum thickness. In doing so, the reference plane may be far from the selected interval so that the vein boundaries do not actual cover the entire interval. I've created meshes on the selected intervals to be guides to the reference surface, but this is not a full proof workflow to assure the non-snapped vein will completely cover all the selected intervals. Our current workflow is to review the vein and add hangingwall or footwall intercepts (and snap to them) to force the vein to cover the intervals, but this is time consuming. It'd be nice to have the reference plane snapped to the midpoints of each interval and be assured that the minimum width envelope covers the selected interval. Can this be done without excessive manual digitization?
Answers
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I had exactly the same question last week that I put to the Support team. They told me that the newest version of Leapfrog (2026.1) allows snapping to be kept on while applying a minimum thickness but when I tried it the drillhole intervals below the minimum threshold were still snapped with the outside portions maintaining the minimum.
I did figure out a rather tedious workaround: 1. create veins as normal from the intersections; 2. create a new mesh from vein segment midpoints - note that away from the intersections this won't exactly match the mid-surface generated in Vein modelling (not the same as the reference surface). If this is important you will need to manually add polylines to match. 3. use the midpoint mesh as input to a Distance buffer object with the distance set to half the minimum thickness you want. 4. take the distance buffer object as input to a new Intrusion model in the same GM as the veins (new intrusion > from surface), and give it the same lithology code as the vein. 5. activate both the pinched out vein and the distance buffer so that the resulting Output Volume is a merge of the two models.
Obviously depending on how many veins you have this is a bit annoying. The other way to approach this (which I haven't tried) would be to edit the vein selection intervals themselves to ensure they all meet the minimum true thickness requirements. I would have to think some more about how to easily achieve this.
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