MINING & TERRAIN ENGINEERING
STREAM is desktop mining software for the engineering work between the survey flight and the monthly report. It opens gigabyte-scale mine survey data straight from GeoTIFF and LAS/LAZ, turns it into a working surface, and runs bench design, haul road design, blast pattern design and volume reporting on that surface — on a normal engineering laptop, fully offline.
Most mine and quarry engineering follows the same loop: fly or scan the site, build a surface, design against that surface, calculate a quantity, and hand a drawing or a report to someone else. The survey is rarely the slow part. The slow part is moving the result between a viewer that cannot compute, a CAD package that does not know the terrain, and a spreadsheet that has to be rebuilt every period.
STREAM keeps that loop in one place. The same terrain that renders in the 3D view is the terrain the bench template daylights against, the terrain the blast holes read their collar elevations from, and the terrain the volume report is computed on — so a design and its quantity can never drift apart.
Load the elevation model your survey pipeline produced — a photogrammetry DSM from a drone flight, a bare-earth DEM, or a LAS/LAZ point cloud rasterized to a surface. STREAM streams it out of core, so a gigabyte-scale pit survey opens and pans at full detail instead of loading into memory first.
The coordinate system is read from the file and confirmed before the layer joins the project, so every later measurement lands where it belongs. Orthophotos drape on the same surface, which is what makes a crest line or a stockpile toe easy to trace by eye rather than by guesswork.
Set bench height, berm width and batter angle, and STREAM builds the benched slope from the boundary you drew. Slopes can be entered in degrees or as 1:x, and you choose which of the three parameters is derived from the other two — the derived field is locked so the set stays internally consistent.
The daylight line is computed as the intersection of the slope profile with the existing ground, so the toe and crest follow the real terrain rather than an assumed plane. A balance curve plots volume against platform elevation, cut on one side and fill on the other; the crossing point is the level where the two balance.
The same tool works in both directions — an excavation with benched walls, or a spoil dump whose capacity you want rather than its excavation quantity. Checks flag an overall slope angle past your limit, a berm too narrow for machine access, a design that never daylights, a partial last bench, and a slope that crosses itself at a re-entrant corner, each with the value and the limit it breaks.
Place PI vertices on the terrain, set circular curves by radius and add clothoid transitions where the geometry needs them. The vertical profile is built from PVI points, grades and vertical curves against a ground line taken straight from the DEM, so the design always sits on the surface you surveyed.
Define carriageway width, shoulders and cut/fill batter slopes, then apply superelevation through curves by edge or axis rotation. You get the section at every station with its cut and fill areas, a station-by-station quantity table and a mass haul view of the balance. Standards checking re-runs after every edit and lists violations of maximum grade, minimum radius and sight distance with the station where they occur.
Draw the block boundary and the face line, then set staggered or square layout, burden, spacing, front offset and grid rotation. The row nearest the face follows the face line rather than the grid, so the front burden stays even along an irregular crest.
Each collar elevation is read from the DEM and the design floor can be derived from the surveyed ground, so hole depth and inclined length follow the real bench instead of an assumed flat top. Burden relief is measured along the hole axis at every elevation, which is where an inclined hole on a battered face gets tight — plan distance to the crest understates it.
Load the collars the crew actually drilled and STREAM reports the deviation against the design, keeping measured values separate so they never overwrite it. The block comes back with blasted volume and tonnage plus a hole-by-hole table of collar, depth and length, exported to Excel or CSV using the same row lettering as the drawings.
Stockpile volume is computed above a chosen reference base with several modes for the pile toe, then converted to tonnage with the material density you enter, and exported as a print-ready PDF report for inventory or audit.
Earthwork volumes are computed as cut and fill against a reference surface or level, and station-based cubature gives cross-section areas and volumes with DXF section drawings for the drawing set.
For progress and reconciliation, compare two surveys of the same area: STREAM reports deposition and erosion separately with a volume figure and its uncertainty, which is how a month of pit advance or dump growth turns into a number you can defend.
Slope analysis colours the surface by gradient so an over-steepened face or a batter that has raveled shows up without measuring it by hand. Contours are generated at your interval directly from the terrain, including the graded design once it has been written into the working surface.
Hydrology shows where water runs and where it collects — useful for sump placement and for understanding a pit floor that keeps flooding. Sun and shadow analysis gives shading through the day and year, and viewshed analysis answers what is visible from a point, which is what a screening bund or a camera position argument usually comes down to.
Designs, contours, sections and measured geometry export to DXF for CAD; tables go out as CSV or Excel; surfaces and analysis rasters export as GeoTIFF; and the site can be handed over as KMZ for Google Earth. Stockpile and design reports export as print-ready PDF.
Nothing here needs a subscription seat on the other side to open — the outputs are the formats mine planning, survey and civil teams already exchange.
STREAM is a native Windows x64 application with GPU terrain rendering through Vulkan. There is no upload step, no per-project quota and no processing queue: survey data stays on the machine it was loaded on, which is what makes it usable on a site network with limited or no internet.
Academic use is always free — for researchers and universities, now and in the future.
Every stage of the loop has its own page with the detail, the supported formats and the questions people actually ask.
Survey and volume analysis for mine sites — stockpile inventory, earthwork and pit change.
Learn moreBench height, berm width and batter angle, with the daylight line taken from the real ground.
Learn moreHaul road alignment, vertical profile, typical section and station quantities.
Learn moreDrill patterns on a surveyed bench, with depths read from the DEM and as-drilled comparison.
Learn moreVolume above a reference base, density-based tonnage and a PDF report.
Learn moreCut and fill volumes against a reference surface or level.
Learn moreStation-based cubature with cross-section areas and DXF section drawings.
Learn moreDeposition and erosion between two surveys, with volume and uncertainty.
Learn moreStreaming very large digital elevation models without waiting for them to load.
Learn moreLAS/LAZ point clouds from LiDAR or photogrammetry, rasterized to a surface.
Learn moreWhat to do with a drone survey once the photogrammetry step is finished.
Learn moreGradient colouring to find over-steepened faces and check design angles.
Learn moreContour generation at your interval, including over the graded design.
Learn moreFlow paths and where water collects on the pit floor.
Learn moreDXF, CSV, GeoTIFF and KMZ outputs for CAD, spreadsheets and GIS.
Learn moreReading, assigning and transforming the coordinate system of every layer.
Learn moreIn day-to-day mine and quarry engineering it is used to turn survey data into decisions: build a surface from a drone or LiDAR survey, design benches, haul roads and blast patterns against that surface, calculate excavation and stockpile quantities, and produce the drawings and reports the site runs on. STREAM covers that terrain-and-quantity side of the work; it is not a geological block modelling or scheduling package.
Yes. STREAM is a native Windows application that does all its processing locally. There is no upload, no cloud queue and no per-project quota, so it works on a site network with limited or no internet, and survey data never leaves the machine.
Yes. It opens GeoTIFF elevation models and orthophotos from any photogrammetry pipeline, and LAS/LAZ point clouds from LiDAR or dense matching, which are rasterized to a surface you can measure and design on. Gigabyte-scale files are streamed rather than loaded into memory first.
Yes. You set bench height, berm width and batter angle, and the benched slope is built from the boundary you drew. The daylight line is computed as the intersection of the slope profile with the existing terrain, so the toe and crest follow the surveyed ground rather than an assumed plane, and the design can be written back into the working terrain so contours and sections read the graded surface.
The volume is computed above a reference base — with several modes for how the pile toe is defined — and multiplied by the material density you enter. The result, together with the reference mode and the measured extent, goes into a print-ready PDF report so the figure can be checked later.
Yes. Designs, contours, cross-sections and measured geometry export to DXF, tables export to CSV or Excel, surfaces and analysis results export to GeoTIFF, and the site can be exported as KMZ for Google Earth.
Yes. Academic use is always free — for researchers and universities, now and in the future. Contact us through the website for an academic licence.
Free beta for Windows x64. Works fully offline with GeoTIFF, LAS/LAZ and DXF.
Download STREAM free