Workflow of Visualisation of Mole-Rat Burrows Using 3D Datasets Derived from GPR, UAV Surveys, and Interpretative Processing

We present a concise methodology to model and visualise mole-rat burrows by integrating 3D ground-penetrating radar (GPR) volumes, high-resolution 3D surface texture, and interpretative 3D visualisation with open-code software, such as Blender and Houdini. The workflow shows the processing and conversion steps for converting surface and subsurface raw datasets into point clouds, then the amalgamation of those 3D objects into a voxelised volume. The voxelisation script creates a text file, a *.CSV file, that masks the voxels with the values of 0 and 1 depending on whether they are inside or outside a burrow. This parametrisation resulted in a total of 7,730,587 voxels generated, of which 48,952 have a value of 1 within them. This indicates the presence of one burrow system, in which there were about 60–80 burrow segments that were initially identified by GPR but remained rather interpretative than a verified geometry. The entire process enables handling and combining different, complex, 3D datasets into a simple text file and thus enables merging with covariates for further spatial modelling of burrow systems from incomplete, indirect, noisy measurements.