PZero: a new open-source Python geomodelling platform

Commercial 3D geomodelling packages have been available for decades and have now reached a high degree of maturity and sophistication. However, they generally reflect very closely the industrial applications for which they are designed, so for instance it could be difficult to use oil-industry software for other industrial or research purposes. On the other hand, in the last years a growing number of open-source libraries are being actively developed with the main aim of exploring new interpolation algorithms that can be applied to a multitude of different geological environments, hence potentially broadening the fields of application of 3D geomodelling. This potential is still somehow hindered by the steep learning curve of these libraries, that do not provide nice user-friendly GUIs, do not include handy tools for data analysis and input/output, complete visualization and plotting systems, etc. Here we present for the first time PZero, an open-source geomodelling platform written in Python, providing a user-friendly Qt GUI, a large set of data input/output filters, an internal data structure and visualization system based on the VTK library, a system for the management of all entities in a project and their metadata based on Pandas, and numerous analysis and interpolation tools that leverage the possibility to access VTK arrays as simple and intuitive NumPy arrays. At the time of writing, we have implemented both explicit and implicit interpolation algorithms, thanks to VTK built-in methods and to the LoopStructural library, and we can manage all typical geomodelling entities and topological classes. For the future, we look forward to implementing new methods, link other libraries, and hopefully broaden the community of contributors to this project.