Part 3 – Building Fault Planes from Manually Picked Fault Sticks in OpendTect
In Part 1, we looked at why cleaning up your data and visualizing fault attributes are essential steps in structural interpretation studies. In Part 2, we showcased manual interpretation on a plane-by-plane basis.
Now in Part 3, we dive deeper into manual interpretation of faults and describe the most common method: From unsorted fault sticks ➜ to fault planes.
Step 1 — Picking Fault Sticks (either on inlines and crosslines, or time-slices):
✅Display a seismic section and add a fault attribute as overlay
Set the step (e.g. 10, if you wish to interpret sticks every 10th section)
✅Pick sticks (left-Click to start and add seeds, Double-click to end, Shift-click to start a new stick, Control-click to remove seeds)
✅Use Control-Z and Control-X to move the section N steps
✅Continue picking and moving the section until finished.
Step 2 — Grouping Sticks into Fault Planes using the Fault toolbar:
✅Select sticks that belong to one plane by clicking-and-dragging the polygon selection tool
✅Use Control-click-and-drag to add more sticks and to remove sticks from the selected sticks
✅Create a new fault plane, or add to a series of fault planes (e.g. NS-1, NS-2, NS-..., or EW-1, EW-2, EW-,..)
✅Continue until all sticks are copied (or moved) to fault planes
✅QC the created fault planes and where needed manually adjust the sticks in the planes.
👉Coming Up in Part 4
The series will conclude with Automated Fault Plane Extraction:How machine-assisted methods can build full fault networks using attributes like Fault Likelihood and Machine-Learning predicted Fault Likelihood.