I'd like to share an open source project that generates synthetic datasets of 3D features seen in underground mines: drill holes, geological shapes, block models, and mine workings (tunnels). It is possible to create several mine levels and to specify ranges and other distribution settings to produce configurations that mimic existing mines. The tool has been written in such a way that it's possible to produce datasets featuring millions of block models and tenths of thousands of drill holes, for instance.
The sofware has been developed by my colleagues from IBM Research and I, and it was just recently presented at SIGSPATIAL. We have been using it primarily to evaluate the scalability of GIS systems when it comes to e.g., distance and intersection computation.
You may also find it interesting to read about our methods to speed up 3D spatial queries in the same paper that presents the synthetic mine generator. Our techniques improve over PostGIS by more than 1700x: queries that used to take more than 20 hours now complete in under a minute.
Please let me know if you find the software useful. Pull requests are welcome, too! :-)
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