Bentley combines point clouds, raster, geometry in one package

Call fully featured 3D modeling software an ‘industry first’

by Sam Pfeifle | April 17, 2012

HOUSTON – Here at SPAR International, Bentley unveiled its long-awaited Descartes V8i (SELECTseries 3), a 3D modeling software package that combines point clouds, raster imagery, and geometry in a way that Bentley said is an industry first. The resulting models expand the utility of point clouds by supporting hybrid design workflows that deliver “as-operated” 3D models to serve the operations and maintenance needs of owner-operators, the company said in a release. By uniquely enabling hypermodeling – the intuitive navigation of as-operated models in 3D context that includes engineering information in any form – Bentley said it is committed to enhancing infrastructure safety and resilience while increasing owner-operators’ returns on their engineering investments.

Bentley first introduced point clouds into its portfolio by embedding the high-performance Vortex engine into MicroStation, and more recently acquired Pointools Ltd, which developed Vortex.

Through its release of Bentley Descartes V8i (SELECTseries 3), Bentley said it now launches an information modeling product for advanced point-cloud processing – and the manipulation of STMs – that addresses virtually all of the 3D image processing needs of infrastructure professionals. With this product, project teams can take greater advantage of point clouds in engineering workflows for all categories of infrastructure. Moreover, they’ll be able to work with any type of point-cloud data, including aerial and terrestrial LiDAR and ground-penetrating radar.

Coming soon is a new offering from Bentley that uniquely overcomes the intractable scale of point clouds that has long limited their versatility in information modeling workflows. Called ProjectWise Point-cloud Services, the product streams on demand to Bentley applications only the portion of a point cloud being viewed or queried, facilitating the collaborative work sharing and unlocking the value of terabytes of point-cloud data.

SPAR will get a demonstration of this new product package this week and we’ll have more reporting on the software’s development and likely impact. If you’d like to see it for yourself, Bentley is giving demonstrations on the SPAR International show floor through April 18.