10.2.4 Surfaces

The abstract surface representation is the parent class of all structural surface representations. For surfaces, the concept of patch is used to help the reader software to associate information that may be delivered in several parts. Each patch is a part of a representation, and all the patches together represent one interpretation of a geological object. These surfaces may consist of one or more patches; these patches may be bounded by an outer ring and several inner rings.

A surface may have two roles:

• Map, a representation support for properties.
• Pick, representation support for 3D points picked in 2D or 3D.

A surface may have patch boundaries for some referenced patches as inner and/or outer rings. The inner and outer rings can consist of any polyline representation, polyline set representation, or (linear) subrepresentation of an abstract surface representation.

The writer must give in the referenced patch the patch index corresponding to the order in which the surfaces are stored in the XML instance.

RESQML has these main ways to represent surfaces:

• Triangulated set representations (see 10.2.4.1 Triangulated Set Representations ).
• Grid 2D and grid 2D set representations, including lattice (see 10.2.4.2 Grid 2D Representation and Grid 2D Set Representation ).
• Plane set representations (see 10.2.5 Plane Set Representation ).