Webinar Recap: Enhancing Visualizations With New 3D Picks and Contact Surfaces
Recently, our Surfer Pro and Senior Technical Sales Specialist, Drew Dudley, hosted a live webinar to introduce one of the most exciting new features in Surfer Beta: the ability to create contact picks and surfaces directly from your data. Whether you’re working on environmental investigations, remediation projects, or subsurface modeling for infrastructure, this new feature is designed to enhance your efficiency, increase clarity, and reduce your reliance on expensive third-party modeling software.
But if you missed the webinar (or just want a quick refresher), this blog will walk you through the highlights from the session and recap the core steps Drew covered.
A Smarter Way to Model Subsurface Layers
During the webinar, Drew walked through a practical workflow for anyone who needs to model lithology surfaces from drillhole data. Think of situations where you’re tasked with calculating volumes between two stratigraphic layers, identifying the top of bedrock, or estimating how deep a groundwater table lies. If you’ve had to do any of these before, you know how critical—and time-consuming—it can be.
With Surfer Beta’s new 3D contact picks and surfaces, you can now streamline this process significantly. Throughout the webinar, Drew demonstrated how easy it is to:
- Visualize surfaces and volumes in 3D using a variety of rendering techniques
- Calculate volume between lithology surfaces to obtain precise metrics
- Approximate 3D volumes above and below target contamination thresholds
- Export and customize a 3D PDF for a polished, stakeholder-ready final output
To put all that into perspective, here’s a brief look at the workflow Drew mentioned in the webinar so you can start building your own 3D models with greater impact.
1. Starting With the Right Data (Time Stamp: 5:23)
The process began with a drillhole dataset that included lithology and soil classification data, such as USCS codes. In the webinar, Drew used real-world data from Golden Software power user Zach Dickson, who worked on a PFAS contamination project at an air base in California. With the drillholes already loaded in Surfer, the next step was to import the lithology intervals and make sure the soil classification data was structured for use in the 3D View.
2. Creating Drillhole Contacts (Time Stamp: 16:16)
With lithology data in place, Drew used the Create Contacts feature to automatically put markers at key stratigraphic boundaries based on the USCS soil codes. These contact picks represented the transitions between soil layers, such as clay silt to sandy silt. Using the “Upper/Lower” method, Drew also defined which soil layers to include in the analysis, so Surfer would generate the contacts accordingly. The size and appearance of these contacts could be adjusted in the Properties window to improve visibility in the 3D View.
3. Automatically Generating Surfaces From Contacts (Time Stamp: 21:30)
Next, Drew showed how Surfer Beta can now automatically convert contact picks into full lithologic surfaces. With just one checkbox (“Create surfaces for all contacts”), Surfer generated multiple stratigraphic surfaces—without the need to manually export picks or run the gridding process multiple times. From there, Drew customized the gridding method, resolution, and appearance of each surface. Transparency was also added to enhance the layered 3D effect.
4. Visualizing and Analyzing in 2D and 3D (Time Stamp: 36:11)
To enrich the visualization, Drew switched back to the 2D plot window to bring the generated surfaces into the map as contour layers. After setting the correct coordinate system, he overlaid an aerial image from Google Maps to provide real-world context. He also demonstrated how to generate cross-sectional profiles and contour maps from the surfaces to enhance understanding.
5. Calculating Volumes and Creating an Isopach Map (Time Stamp: 43:48)
Once the surfaces were in place, Surfer’s Grid Volume tools could be used to compute volumetric data between layers, ideal for quantifying material between geologic horizons. Drew showed how to calculate volume between two selected surfaces and create an isopach map to visualize thickness variations across the site.
6. Sharing Results With Stakeholders (Time Stamp:48:35)
To wrap up the workflow, Drew touched on the several export options for sharing results with stakeholders. In Surfer, he explained that you could export contours from any layer, save high-quality static images from the 2D or 3D views, or generate an interactive 3D PDF, a stakeholder-friendly deliverable that brings subsurface data to life.
Bring Your Subsurface Data to Life
The new 3D contact picks and surfaces in Surfer Beta mark a major leap forward for subsurface modeling, giving scientists, engineers, and environmental professionals an easier, faster, and more visually compelling way to understand their data. Instead of juggling multiple tools or exporting between programs, you can now handle the entire workflow—from importing field data to creating professional 3D visuals—all within Surfer.
If you want to see this full workflow in action, watch the complete webinar to explore each step firsthand. You’ll learn how to set up your data, create contact picks and surfaces, calculate volumes, and export a polished final output for stakeholders.
