The Drybones Bay Diamondiferous Kimberlite  

is a 3D animation we produced in 1996 - and updated recently (2002) with new graphics and in a new digital video codec. It is about a mining exploration project in the North West Territories. It has been shown at many mining conventions - including the 1997 Prospectors & Developers Association Convention (a major international mining convention held annually in Toronto).

The Project

Drybones Bay is a deep inlet on Great Slave Lake, just 50km southeast of Yellowknife (in the middle of in Canada's North West Territories). Underneath it is a large diamondiferous kimberlite. It was discovered in the early 1990s, shortly after the Lac des Gras find. (Kimberlites are carrot-shaped volcanic intrusions from which diamonds originate. The North West Territories has recently opened up as a major centre of global diamond production.) 

We heard about this project in 1996, and found it a very interesting geological property. It is one of the largest kimberlites in North America, and very well located for both exploration and development -- much more conveniently-placed than the Lac de Gras mines (which are some 200km farther from Yellowknife, and in preliminary production).

We soon proposed to the junior mining company exploring the site to do a 3D animation as a promotional tool to assist in raising finance at conventions, such as the PDAC. We produced it to run easily on a laptop computer at our client's booth. It seemed that 3D animation was the perfect way to show the impressive spatial qualities of the kimberlite -- especially the large size. They agreed. We finished the project in approximately two months, using a three-man team, an Amiga 1200 for 2D graphics, and a network of three PC computers for 3D development (the largest of which was a 166MHz Pentium 1, that we had to rent -- remember, this is 1996). (Needless to say we have  much more powerful tools at our disposal today.)

The Script

We decided to do the animation in three basic parts. First, an introductory flight over the tundra that followed a helicopter as it arrived to hover over Drybones Bay itself. Then a schematic underground view -- in which we show the actual kimberlite in relation to the surface terrain (partly to give a sense of its immense size). Finally we would follow our helicopter once more in a flight away from the bay. All the while text-data would appear as overlaid captions to give key points on the exploration project. 

Getting The Data

Unfortunately, all the data on the project was in old-fashioned 2D paper format. The geological exploration was all being done in traditional means, with side- and top-view paper diagrams and cross-sections, magnetic survey print-outs, and overhead surface maps; and the larger surface terrain was available only in the form of standard  government 2D topographic maps. (Digitized 3D versions of much of the tundra were not available at the time. In fact, we found an actual gap of uncharted terrain where the edges of two topo maps did not meet -- hopefully the Government of Canada has rectified this error by now.) Thus we needed to take all this 2D paper-based data and somehow convert it to 3D digital form. And we needed it to be scientifically accurate.

The Surface Animation

For the surface animation we retrieved existing 2D topographic maps and scanned them into a digital format as standard 2D graphics (literally, bitmaps). Next we painstakingly cleaned these maps up by hand -- using a standard paint program (on the venerable Amiga; today we would use Photoshop) to physically remove all grid-lines and numbers, elevation numbers, names, road symbols, building symbols, zoning designations, municipal names, et cetera. (Luckily this expanse of tundra was very remote, so there was little "human-civilization" data on the maps.) At the end we had a successive grayscale image of clean topographic "shapes": water was black, and each higher elevation was in a lighter shade of gray. (We also found the terrain was too flat -- with only about two or three elevation levels above the water-level. This would produce some very weird-looking hills -- a series of flat-beveled plains rather than round, rolling terrain. Therefore we added topographic layers between the existing layers, effectively doubling the topographic detail -- and enhancing the 3D look of the terrain -- while staying accurate to the essential character of the terrain.) 

We were then able to take this image and rastarize it -- convert it into a large 3D shape. Next we imported this 3D shape into a terrain generation program -- telling the program that the bottom level (black) was water, and that the remaining terrain was to be rendered as arctic tundra. This gave us our superficial 3D model of Drybones Bay. Then, using the terrain-generation program, we could animate fly-overs of this terrain fairly easily.