Seequent, The Bentley Subsurface Company, has unveiled a landmark release of its Leapfrog solution for mining—industry-leading 3D geological modelling and mineral resource estimation tools—packed with extensive enhancements and faster workflows to improve productivity and decision-making. Comprehensive integration of Leapfrog to cloud-based platform Seequent Evo, for geoscience collaboration and data management, heralds a new era of cloud hybridization for the industry’s leading 3D geological modelling tool.
New options for structural trend visualization allow a custom grid to inform the visualization of the trend; display options include orientation information and strength. Image Credit: Seequent
Leapfrog 2025.1 delivers value to mining customers with advancements to Leapfrog Geo’s structural workflows, including structural trends and resulting modelled surfaces. This saves users time creating and understanding structural trends, to aid in understanding mineralization, identifying new targets, and defining areas for infill drilling. For Leapfrog Edge users, particularly large-scale operations with complex resource modelling projects, faster, flexible ways to create multi-domain estimates will enable users to replicate estimators defined for one domain across multiple others in a single action.
Summary Highlights for Leapfrog Geo and Leapfrog Edge:
- Refreshed structural trends for faster and smarter modelling with fewer manual edits
- Face mapping using polylines to streamline geological model updates
- Data preparation, visualization and analysis upgrades for survey, point and structural datasets
- Cross-section updates for improved communication with stakeholders and colleagues
- Efficient multi-domain set-up and rotation management
Dr Rachel Murtagh, Manager, Product Management - Geology, Geostatistics and Data Science, Seequent, says: “At Seequent, we are committed to empowering geoscience-driven industries to address critical challenges with greater efficiency and intelligence. As project complexity increases and economic and ESG pressures intensify, we continue to advance our solutions to meet evolving demands.
“This Leapfrog release introduces significant updates to the structural trend’s usability, visualization and data handling, and other features, to deliver immediate value to our mining and exploration customers. Leapfrog’s integration to the Seequent Evo platform and its applications, BlockSync and Driver, represents a generational change in the way we will add value for our customers.”
Enhanced Structural Workflows and Functionality:
Leapfrog 2025.1 updates to 3D modelling tool Leapfrog Geo, for mining and exploration projects, allow users to build and refine models even faster. Key feature and functionality updates include:
- Refreshed structural trends to enable faster modelling with fewer manual edits, saving users time in creating and understanding these trends. Structural trends are essential for making implicitly modelled surfaces and volumes geologically meaningful. This update provides a more comprehensive presentation of the structural trend. An updated interface introduces new controls for filtering input data and adjusting ‘clustering’ settings. Additionally, a new editable visual representation of the structural trend offers a more accurate and user-friendly depiction of the trend and can match the actual extents of the input data.
- Streamlined model updates with face mapping using polylines: To further enhance how field mapping data is incorporated into the model, new data can be appended to a polyline to manage it as one polyline object in the Leapfrog project.
- Data preparation, visualization and analysis improvements: New import and share category colours for geoscience data have been added to standardise legend colouring quickly. A streamlined process for combining mixed data sources for point datasets (e.g. drilling intervals and points), and structural datasets (e.g. core logging and surface and face mapping) avoids rework of numeric models. Filtering for block models is significantly faster with new volume filters from any closed mesh volume.
- Communicate effectively with cross sections: Users now have the option to set an orthogonal or illustrative (formerly scaled) projection style on long sections, for datatypes including drillholes, planned drillholes and polylines. Illustrative projection is ideal for communicating with management and creating visual reports for non-technical audiences and orthogonal projection is ideal for sharing accurate data with contractors and technical stakeholders. Other improvements include applying query filters on the polyline to render only part of the line, and displaying positive or negative offset labels for holes on sections.
Resource Estimation Advancements:
Updates for the resource estimation tool Leapfrog Edge significantly reduce workload, improve consistency across domains, and accelerate the delivery of high-confidence resource models.
- Efficient multi-domain set-up and rotation management deliver faster, flexible ways to create multi-domain estimates. The new Copy Domained Estimations feature enables users to replicate estimators defined for one domain across multiple others in a single action. This new capability is compelling when used alongside Volume Rotation Attribution, streamlining the setup of mineral resource estimations for complex deposits with multiple geological domains and variables.
With Volume Rotation Attribution, each geological domain can retain its specific dip, dip azimuth, and pitch, ensuring domain-specific orientations flow seamlessly through the estimation process. Once variography and estimation parameters are defined for a key variable in one domain, Copy Domained Estimations allows users to duplicate those settings—including variograms and search ellipses—across other variables and domains, automatically preserving each domain’s unique orientation.
Future of Data Management, Collaboration and Sharing: Leapfrog and Seequent Evo
Leapfrog 2025.1 has been built with comprehensive integration to Seequent Evo, a powerful cloud-based platform designed to help Seequent users, and the broader geoscience community, collaborate and manage data centrally for faster, smarter decision-making.
The integration with Evo enables connected workflows from Leapfrog to the first of Evo’s cloud native apps, BlockSync for managing, analysing and connecting block model data, and Driver, for rapid spatial exploratory data analysis of drilling datasets.
Dr Murtagh says, “With the availability of Seequent Evo, Leapfrog 2025.1 will become a cloud-integrated application, unlocking capabilities previously limited or unavailable to the desktop environment. Leapfrog, enabled by Evo, will break new ground in data management and collaboration, data-driven geological modelling, geostatistical applications and block model management by leveraging cloud processing, computing and connectivity.”