Sorry James--see the thread you just created for me.

Woops I meant to reply here, James.

How about you, James. I'm talking about importing multiple tessellated surfaces into SU and using Intersect/Model, then clipping away the excess. Imagine creating a cube of non-coplanar sides this way. In your experience with this forum has this been discussed before?

Hello everyone. I'm testing/trying out Sketchup Pro to see if it's right for our company's needs. We are in the upstream oil and gas industry--we wish to create solid-appearing 3d models of the subsurface. Primarily that means models of underground geological structure (= the way strata undulate and are faulted). For the most part these surfaces (the tops of a rock strata layer or a vertical fault) will all be non-coplanar. You have probably already guessed the more horizontal (layer) surfaces are not at all unlike topographic surfaces--just underground. These can't really be drawn freehand--they need to be the actual x-y-z surfaces we have interpreted from 3d seismic data. I can export these geologic surfaces from my interpretation/exploration software as flat ascii x-y-z data files and modify to hopefully be imported into Sketchup. From what I can see so far, the .dem file format might be the best bet, but (I hope) many of you know of other ways as well. Right now I don't even have a proper sample .dem text file to look at for comparison. Can you guys point me to similar discussions of this within your forum and/or give me advice.

Hello everyone. I'm testing/trying out Sketchup Pro to see if it's right for our company's needs. We are in the upstream oil and gas industry--we wish to create solid-appearing 3d models of the subsurface. Primarily that means models of underground geological structure (= the way strata undulate and are faulted). For the most part these surfaces (the tops of a rock strata layer or a vertical fault) will all be non-coplanar. You have probably already guessed the more horizontal (layer) surfaces are not at all unlike topographic surfaces--just underground. These can't really be drawn freehand--they need to be the actual x-y-z surfaces we have interpreted from 3d seismic data. I can export these geologic surfaces from my interpretation/exploration software as flat ascii x-y-z data files and modify to hopefully be imported into Sketchup. From what I can see so far, the .dem file format might be the best bet, but (I hope) many of you know of other ways as well. Right now I don't even have a proper sample .dem text file to look at for comparison. Can you guys point me to similar discussions of this within your forum and/or give me advice. I'd be happy if the moderator should decide to start a new thread with this too. Thanks!