These functions allow for interaction between Matlab and Gmsh, with a focus on meshing 3D representations of fault surfaces based on their surface traces. A basic workflow for meshing requires a text file of coordinates defining the surface traces of faults, extraction of those coordinates and projection of surface traces to depth, optional rotation of the fault coordinates to adopt a dip, and finally meshing of fault surfaces.
The text file containing surface coordinates should be a delimited file as exported from ArcGIS (with the beginning of each fault identified by a row containing FID and the end of each fault marked by a row with END) or identifying distinct entities with a row that starts with >. Each data row should contain x, y, z coordinates of a point along the surface trace (z should be 0). The function extractcoords.m reads this file and replicates the surface coordinates' x, y locations and adds a specified z location to define the base of the fault.
The meshing workflow is:
% Clone the repository
!git clone --recursive https://github.com/jploveless/meshing.git
% Add directories to path
addpath ./meshing
addpath ./meshing/tridisl
[c, nc] = extractcoords('examplefaults.txt', 3); % Read in example faults
[c, nc] = extractcoords('examplefaults_arcgis.txt', 3); % Same as above, but using another file format
% Rotate each fault to give a dip of 60 degrees.
% Can alternatively specify a vector of dip values to assign a unique value to each fault
rc = rotatefaultcoords(c, 60, nc);
p = gmshcoords(c, nc, 0.5); % Mesh faults (original coordinates) with a nominal element size of 0.5 units
p = PatchCoordsx(p); % Calculate some geometric parameters of faults
meshview(p.c, p.v, p.zc); % Visualize faults, coloring by element centroid depth
