It is with great sadness that I announce that Dr. Christopher Rautman, C Tech’s Chief Geologist passed away on May 12th from complications related to an ongoing illness.
I’ve known, liked, worked with and respected Chris since we first met ~20 years ago when he was at Sandia National Laboratories. The first projects he tackled with our software included the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Repository and the salt domes and solution mined caverns used to store the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserves. Over the years that Chris was at Sandia, the projects where he employed our software were some of the most challenging ones C Tech encountered, and that helped to make our software much better. There are many important features in our software that trace back to Chris’ work and suggestions. Under his guidance, Sandia co-funded the development of 3D Printing technology in MVS (the predecessor to Earth Volumetric Studio). This lead to current modules like intersection, intersection_shell & union, as well as multiple enhancements to our VRML exporting which now allows us to create 3D PDFs and Sketchfab exports in addition to 3D printing. Anyone who has used our software to model salt domes or solution mined caverns has probably worked directly with Chris, but if not, you should know that the techniques used there are directly attributable to his efforts.
When Chris retired from Sandia 5 years ago, I was very excited to have him join C Tech’s team where his vast experience and keen mind was put to good use. He took the lead on many challenging consulting projects and one of the things he could do, that I can’t imagine being able to replace, was finding, interpreting and digitizing 50-100 year old drilling records that were locked away in the archives of organizations like the Texas Railroad Commission. To see the 3D models that he created from paper drawings that were decades old is the stuff of Sci-Fi movies.
I will miss Chris. I learned a great deal every time I worked with him and I counted him as a true friend.
Reed Copsey, President
C Tech Development Corp