Kirra’s 3D view is a Three.js-powered 3D visualisation that renders blast holes, surfaces, KAD drawings, and GeoTIFF imagery in full 3D. It shares the same coordinate space as the 2D canvas – no Z scaling or elevation transform is applied.
Click the 2D/3D toggle button in the top bar to switch views. The 3D view uses the same data and coordinate system as 2D, but allows orbiting, elevation viewing, and surface draping.
| Action | Control |
|---|---|
| Pan | Click and drag (default mode) |
| Orbit | Alt + drag |
| Camera roll | Shift + Alt + drag |
| Zoom | Scroll wheel – zooms towards the mouse cursor position (when Cursor Zoom is on in Settings) |
| Context menu | Right-click |
The Orbit Focus tool changes the orbit centre to any point you click in the 3D scene. By default, orbiting rotates around the centroid of all loaded data. With Orbit Focus, you can click on a specific blast hole, surface feature, or drawing to set that point as the new rotation centre.
The orbit centre persists until you click a new position or use Reset View.
The 3D Settings button on the Select toolbar opens the Settings dialog, with 2D, 3D and Performance tabs. The 3D tab controls camera damping, cursor zoom, scroll-wheel direction, the plumb line, lighting, the orbit rotation model and speed, axis lock, the axis gizmo and text billboarding. The Performance tab sets the triangle limits for drawing surfaces in 3D.
See Settings for every option and its default.
The 3D renderer choice, level-of-detail override, instanced holes and 3D simplification are developer fall-back options. They live in the side panel under About ▸ Developer, not in the Settings dialog, and you do not normally need to change them.
A section is a slice through your design, not just a cut. You choose where the slice sits, how thick it is, and then step it through the pattern to read the holes, the bench and the surfaces it passes through.
Click Section Plane in the Select toolbar to open the dialog.
Turning Enable Section Plane on switches the view to 3D. A section is a 3D construct, so in 2D the controls would appear to do nothing.
The Plane list offers five ways to define the slice:
| Option | What it does |
|---|---|
| Two Points | You click two points; the slice runs vertically through them |
| Segment | You click an existing line; the slice runs vertically along it |
| XY (Elevation) | A horizontal slice, stepping up and down |
| YZ (East-West) | A vertical slice, stepping east and west |
| XZ (North-South) | A vertical slice, stepping north and south |
The view switches to 3D, turns to look along the section, and frames it to the line you drew. Press Esc or right-click to cancel a pick.
If you want the section in a particular place, draw a guideline there first, then section along it:
The direction you drew the line in sets which way the view faces.
To pick again at any time, use the pick button beside the Plane list. Choosing the same entry in the list again will not restart a pick.
These two distances set how thick the slice is, measured from the section line:
Both are positive distances, and both default to 1, giving a 2 metre slice. Anything outside those two edges is hidden.
Setting See Behind to 0 makes the section line itself the back edge.
Slice thickness and step are remembered between sessions.
A section is for looking until you ask otherwise: tools still work in plan. Tick Draw on plane to make the section the plane the tools work in — offset, extend, hole set-out, move, Design Plane tagging and triangulation. It needs Enable Section Plane and the 3D view, and ticking it also shows the plane.
While it is on, the dialog shows a WORK PLANE ACTIVE warning. Untick Draw on plane to work in plan again. It is never remembered between sessions, so a section opened later never changes how the tools behave on its own.
Show Section Plane draws a grid on the section so you can see the plane. The grid spacing is the Step Increment.
While a section is enabled, moving a hole keeps it on the section plane. The screen is the plane, so a move has one degree of freedom in plan — along the line. Dragging up or down will not push a hole sideways out of the slice.
3D selection uses a fat ray cast (cylinder) from the camera through the mouse position to infinity. This provides screen-space selection similar to the 2D canvas.
In 3D, the Polygon Select tool works in screen space:
The 3D view uses the same centroid-shifted coordinate space as the 2D canvas:
Large UTM coordinates are shifted by subtracting the data centroid to maintain floating-point precision. The same XY transform used in 2D is applied in 3D – no scaling is performed.