Tech Soft 3D, a leading provider of engineering software development toolkits, says its HOOPS Visualize is serving as the graphics engine for the MineRP Platform, delivering powerful 3D visualisation capabilities across MineRP’s entire mining solution, a single integrated workspace for mine planning and execution. The sophisticated platform enables mining companies to easily visualise very large and complex geological models, providing users with insights that guide better and more profitable decisions.
“The old ways of solving mining issues are not valid anymore,” said Empie Strydom, Vice President of Marketing at MineRP, which recently became part of Epiroc. “As a company, we are focused on completely novel approaches to the problems that mining companies face. Instead of adding more tools, our integration platform solves the hard problems that standalone mining applications cannot even attempt.”
The challenges around mining are numerous, starting with the simple fact that most of the easy-to-reach deposits of valuable metals, minerals, fossil fuels, and other materials within the earth have already been tapped. The remaining orebodies are hidden away in ever deeper, hard-to-reach pockets. Coming up with a viable way to understand the orebody and its potential financial value, plan the mining and excavation, and execute the job requires generating and bringing together large amounts of data about the mineral resource being mined. As an example, geological block models, which can often be massive in size, are one of the most critical pieces of data for making an informed decision about where to dig.
“A geology block model with 30 million records in it would actually be on the small-ish side,” noted Anton Van Der Walt, Chief Digital Officer at MineRP. “It’s not unusual to have terabytes of data representing Mine Technical Datasets.”
MineRP’s key innovation has been to integrate these masses of geological data with other datasets – from mine planning, design, and scheduling to ERP systems, IoT systems, and other systems required to run a modern mine – to give mining customers a single integrated platform for all their mining data. But in order to enable customers to bring together and spatially visualise, analyse, and even animate disconnected datasets within its MineRP Platform, the company needed a foundation of powerful visualisation capabilities.
Tech Soft 3D says HOOPS Visualize provided an ideal solution for MineRP. “As the industry’s leading visualisation toolkit, HOOPS Visualize powers advanced graphics in hundreds of engineering applications around the globe, enabling the delivery of stunning 3D graphics.”
“We’ve standardised on HOOPS Visualize across the entire MineRP Platform,” said Van Der Walt. “All visualisation is done through a single visualisation module that relies on HOOPS Visualize – we don’t use anyone else’s graphics technology. The number of features available in the engine, and the support provided by Tech Soft 3D, as far as graphics engines go, it’s the best that we have found, and it’s a very, very important part of the technology stack inside our platform.”
By using HOOPS Visualize in the MineRP stack, a customer can look at their mine, quickly identify the low-grade and high-grade areas, and then decide where they want to focus their extraction efforts. For example, in response to changing commodity prices or product demand, they might want to only target specific areas of the mineral reserve which will yield the optimal ore for the current market demand. Alternately, they might want to examine overbreaks and underbreaks: areas that they shouldn’t have mined into at all and areas where they didn’t mine enough and left some of the valuable ore behind. All this kind of rich information becomes very actionable for mining companies when it is brought together and visualised.
“The MineRP platform is some of the best mining software out there,” said Van Der Walt. “That’s partially because of the deep industry expertise of our people, but it’s also because we’ve got a brilliant technology stack. We have world-class partners like Tech Soft 3D supplying the best-of-breed technologies that we use in our platform – and that ensures we can continue tackling the toughest challenges and problems for our customers in the mining industry.”
