Real-Time Visualization and Geometry Reconstruction of Large Oil and Gas Boreholes Based on Caliper Database - Visual Computing: Scientific Visualization and Imaging Systems - page 238

Fig. 13.8 A fake borehole three-dimensional mesh with different levels of detail

moves, only the closer meshes are updated, not the borehole model. This is a
different approach from the commonly used technique, where the model is fully
changed for each level of detail.

13.5 Rendering

Once the data is fully loaded into the main memory and processed, it's possible to
reconstruct a three-dimensional representation of the borehole. As previously
described, some transformations are applied to caliper arm's points in order to
transform them from a bi-dimensional plane to a three-dimensional space. The
next step is to combine each section and create a 3D model of the borehole that can
be used for visualization and analysis. If this combination had not been done, the
model would simply look like as a simple stack of slices instead of a reliable three-
dimensional representation of the borehole.
The representation of the borehole as a series of connected sections makes the
usage of triangle strips [ 12 ] a natural choice for building the geometry. The
connection between two adjacent sections is built with a single triangle strip,
instead of a collection of independent triangles. This results in lower memory
usage by the GPU and better performance. Figure 13.9 shows how we start from
points obtained from the spline interpolation (a) and build the borehole geometry
(b and c).