Visualising Data

Visualising data is an important part of interpreting and refining data and making modelling decisions. This topic describes the tools available for changing how data objects are displayed in the scene. It is divided into:

• Colour Options
• Opacity
• Property Buttons
• Legends
• Slice Mode
• Filtering Data Using Queries
• Filtering Data Using Values and Categories

Tools for visualising data are accessed via the shape list and the shape properties panel:

The tools available depend on the type of object being displayed.

The view list is available for objects that can be displayed in different ways. For example, a lithology data table may contain several columns and the column displayed can be selected from the view list:

Geological and numeric model evaluations are also selected from the view list. See Evaluations.

The shape properties panel adjacent to the shape list provides more detailed control of the appearance of the selected object:

You can select multiple objects in the shape list and change their display properties using the shape properties panel. To do this, hold down the Shift or Ctrl key while clicking each object you wish to change:

Only controls common to the selected objects are available.

Colour Options

The colour options for an object are changed in the shape list, and the options available depend on the type of object. Three different colour display options are shown below:

• The collar table is displayed using a single colour. Click the colour chip to change the colour. See Single Colour Display.
• The Geology table is displayed according to a colourmap of the categories in the table. These colours can be changed by clicking on the Edit Colours button, then clicking on each colour chip in the Legend window.
• The Contaminant table uses a colourmap to display the numeric data. See Colourmaps for more information.

If your organisation uses standard colour coding for category and numeric data, you can import colourmaps for these data types. See Colourmaps below.

Single Colour Display

Many objects viewed in the scene are displayed using a single colour. To change the colour, add the object to the scene window, then click on the colour chip in the shape list. A window will appear in which you can change the colour:

You can:

• Click and drag the ring to pick a colour, then select the darkness or lightness of the colour from the triangle.
• Click on the eyedropper tool (), then click on something elsewhere on the screen to select the colour of that part of the screen.
• Select a colour chip from the palette.
• Set a random colour.
• Enter specific values for the colour to use.

Changes made are automatically applied to the scene. The Revert button changes back to the colour assigned when the window was first opened.

Colourmaps

Numeric and category data are displayed using colourmaps that Leapfrog Geo automatically generates based on the data. Manually changing a colourmap often helps in understanding the data.

Colourmaps can easily be shared between projects on a column-by-column basis, which is useful if your organisation uses standard colourmaps. To import or export a colourmap, expand the data object in the project tree and right-click on a column. The Import and Export options are available from the Colours menu:

To export a colourmap, right-click on the data object and select Colours > Export. If more than one colourmap is associated with the selected object, you will be prompted to choose from those available. Click Export.

In the window that appears, navigate to the folder where you wish to save the colourmap. Enter a filename and click Save. The colourmap will be saved in *.lfc format.

When you import a colourmap:

• For category colourmaps, the existing colourmap will be overwritten.
• For numeric colourmaps, the imported colourmap will be added to those already defined.

To import a colourmap, right-click on the data object and select Colours > Import. Navigate to the folder containing the colourmap file and click Open.

If the object has more than one colourmap associated with it, you will be prompted to choose which one to overwrite.

Click Import.

Leapfrog Geo will map the information in the file to the information in the selected data column.

Category Colourmaps

Category data colourmaps can be edited by adding the data column to the scene, then clicking on the Edit Colours button in the shape list:

To change the colour used for a category, click on its colour chip in the Legend window.

Category colourmaps can also be imported and exported, as described in Colourmaps above.

Numeric Data Colourmaps

There are two types of colourmap used for displaying numeric data:

• Continuous Colourmaps
• Discrete Colourmaps

Leapfrog Geo contains a number of preset colour gradients that are used in displaying both continuous and discrete numeric colourmaps. These are:

• Rainbow (bgyr). This is a perceptually uniform rainbow.
• Rainbow (bgyrm). This is similar to Rainbow (bgyr), but follows red with magenta, which is common in geophysics software and RQD (geotech).
• Viridis. This is a good linear gradient.
• Plasma. This is the default colourmap for face dip.
• Linear (gow). This gradient is useful for elevation data.
• Diverging (bwr). This colourmap can be used when you are interested in data at either end of the spectrum.
• Spectral. With this colourmap, the middle is not white, and white is reserved for bins that have no data.
• Cyclic (mygbm). This is a good colourmap for azimuth data. Northern directions are displayed in blue and southern in yellow.
• Grey (10-95). This grey colourmap works well on white and black backgrounds as it doesn’t start or end in white or black.

Additional colour gradients can be imported into a project in the following formats:

• Geosoft Colour Files (*.tbl)
• ERMapper Lookup Tables (*.lut)
• MapInfo Colour Files (*.clr)
• Leapfrog Colour Files (*.lfc)

Imported colour gradients are stored in the project tree in the Colour Gradients folder. To import a colour gradient right-click on the Colour Gradients folder and select Import Gradient. In the window that appears, navigate to the folder containing the gradient file and click Open. The gradient will be added to the Colour Gradients folder.

To edit the colourmap for an object, add the object to the scene. Click on the colourmap in the shape list and select Edit Colourmaps:

The Edit Colourmaps window will display the colourmap that is currently being used to display the data. The scene will be updated to reflect the changes you make in this window. To save the currently displayed colourmap and return to the main window, click Close.

Continuous Colourmaps

The Gradient list includes all inbuilt and imported gradients. This is the Edit Colourmaps window for editing continuous colourmaps, showing imported gradients from the Colour Gradients folder (top of the list) and the Built-in Gradients:

Once you have selected a gradient, you can change how it is used to display the data by adjusting the limits and the curve points.

The values that lie outside the Limits are coloured with the last colour at the relevant end of the colourmap. If the Dynamic box is ticked, the gradient will be updated when the data is updated, such as when drillhole data is appended. If the box is unticked, the values manually set for the Minimum and Maximum limits will control the lower and upper bounds of the colourmap. Reducing the range of the upper and lower bounds is useful if the bulk of the data points have values in a range much smaller than the overall range of the data. This is common in skewed data.

The From Input Data button automatically adjusts the Minimum and Maximum Limit values so that the colourmap would follow the actual data distribution of the input data. The From Evaluation button appears for data columns that are part of tables produced from other data sources in the project. For example, a numeric data column that is part of a merged table will have the From Evaluation option. From Input Data uses all the data in the source data, whereas From Evaluation uses only the local data.

The transformation of the colourmap can be adjusted by dragging the dots:

Both continuous and discrete colourmaps can be used to display date information. If a date is displayed using a continuous colourmap, the curve points represent the start and end dates:

Discrete Colourmaps

With discrete colourmaps, the selected gradient can be used in generating intervals.

When you create a discrete colourmap, intervals are defined and applied to the data displayed in the scene:

Click the Generate Intervals button to generate intervals based on various statistical methods:

Select an Interval Mode. The options are:

• Quantile. This attempts to create the specified number of intervals so that each interval contains the same number of values.
• Progressive. This attempts to create intervals that enclose progressively smaller percentages of values. For example, 1000 unique values organised into 5 intervals would have the following percentiles: ~33%, ~27%, ~20%, ~13%, ~6%.
• Progressive Double. This is similar to Progressive, but is “steeper”. For example, 1000 values organised into 5 intervals would have the following percentiles: ~50%, ~25%, ~12.5%, ~6.25%, ~3%.
• Equal Intervals. This creates intervals at equal spacing across the range of the values.
• Logarithmic Intervals. This creates intervals at equal spacing, in log-space, across the range of values.
• K Means Clustering. This is an iterative algorithm that sorts values into clusters in which each value belongs to the cluster with the nearest mean. This option can take some time, especially with large datasets and a large number of intervals.

Set the Number of Intervals and the Colour Gradient to be used as the basis for the interval colourings.

The data used can be the Input data or the Evaluation data. The Evaluation option only appears for data columns that are part of tables produced from other data sources in the project. For example, a numeric data column that is part of a merged table will have the Evaluation option. The Input option uses all the data in the source data, whereas the Evaluation option uses only the local data.

The first interval is assigned the first colour of the selected colour gradient and the last interval is assigned the gradient’s last colour; selecting Invert Gradient swaps this around. Remaining intervals are assigned equally along the gradient.

Experiment with the different settings and click Apply to see the effects of changes:

You can also add intervals manually by clicking the Add button. For example, if you create a discrete colourmap to show the different stages of a drilling campaign, the initial colourmap contains only two intervals:

Click the Add button to add new intervals and use the Min and Max entries in the table to set the start and end points of each interval:

Opacity

The opacity slider in the shape list controls the transparency of objects in the scene:

Property Buttons

The property buttons available in the shape list vary according to the type of object selected. For example, property buttons can show or hide the triangles on a mesh, render points as spheres or display a surface clipped to a model boundary. You can always find out what a button does by holding the cursor over the button:

Legends

You can display a legend for many objects, including lithologies. To do this, click the legend button in the shape list:

To remove the legend from the scene, either click the legend button again or click the red X in the scene window:

Slice Mode

When an object is selected in the shape list, a Slice mode property is available in the properties panel. See Object Slice Mode for more information.

Filtering Data Using Queries

When a data table is selected in the shape list, you can use the controls in the shape properties panel to apply filters to the data in the scene. If query filters are available for the selected object, they will be listed in the Query filter list:

Filtering Data Using Values and Categories

In the shape properties panel, you can also filter the range of values displayed. Tick the Value filter box, then set the upper and lower limits of the range of data displayed:

If the data includes date information, you can use the Value filter option to restrict the display to a range of dates.

 

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