Author: Mike Cline, T/X Resources
Do you have a new 3D seismic volume that you need to review quickly? Maybe you just need to scan it to get a feel for the structural trends, or for quickly finding new prospects to concentrate on.
Whatever the case, SMT’s VuPak Chair Cut Animation, a common method of seismic visualization, is a good approach to use for the evaluation. It allows for the simultaneous viewing of three different planes of seismic data, as seen in the image below—Inlines (vertical data surface facing forward), Crosslines (vertical data surface facing towards the left) and Time Slices (horizontal data surface, facing upwards).
The data set being displayed below is a Coherency volume, which is an excellent seismic attribute for highlighting subtle structural and stratigraphic changes in the data. In this case, we’re looking for the major fault trends. Seconds after opening the volume for viewing, we find that there are two significant faults surfaces (the dark purple, linear features being highlighted by the red arrows), which can be seen traversing through various faces of the cube of seismic data volume.
See the VuPak animation (25MB Media Player avi file).
Note: The avi file is fairly large, so it will take some time before the animation starts.
Once you find an interesting feature, the Chair Cut technique allows for a very convenient way to scroll through a 3D data set in any direction. First, you just click on the exposed data surface that you want to scroll through, and then drag that surface to the desired position. Just click and drag—that’s how easy it is to change the data display.
When you’re tracking faults, as in this example, the workflow would be to initially drag the horizontal time slice to a position where the fault was best seen, and then activate the inline surface, and drag it forward to better follow the trend of the fault.
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