Moving faults and building fracture models in a digital world—an example from Glen Coe,Scotland

It is now very easy to create realistic 3D models of rock outcrops from digital photographs. Using images captured on a smartphone or a standard digital camera, a series of overlapping photographs of the outcrop can be merged together and draped over a 3D mesh that accurately represents the topography of the real rock face. The information required to generate the 3D model is all contained within the 2D digital photographs and no other sophisticated surveying equipment is required. There are several freely available software applications that can be used to generate and then interrogate this type of 3D model. This article uses an example from Glen Coe in the SW Highlands of Scotland to demonstrate how best to capture the 3D aspects of an outcrop using a digital camera and then illustrates some of the structural features that can be analysed in more detail.