Bhupinder Singh’s Keynote
Bhupinder Singh presented an overview of the innovations that set Bentley apart from other software providers, including enhancements to the V8i product family. Said Bhupinder, “Greg has told you that to deliver integrated projects, you need solutions that enable collaboration, ensure continuity, and provide context. This is exactly what we had in mind when we launched V8i a few years ago. As a coordinated release of products and solutions, V8i was launched with a set of priorities that drive our innovations to provide you with advantages in intuitive modeling to help you move designs from concept to completion.”
He continued, “These innovations let you interact with 2D and 3D in an integrated and immersive manner, taking advantage of new touch screens and other hardware and software advancements. An intrinsic 3D platform-based geo-coordination allows you to take advantage of information from many sources and automatically geo-reference them. These innovations also help improve project performance. For example, the Delta File Transfer technology in ProjectWise V8i allows you to only transfer the part of the design that has changed between editing sessions, giving you a huge performance improvement when working with large files and datasets. And our commitment to interoperability helps your integrated projects exchange information with other tools and project participants seamlessly.”
He added that since the initial launch of V8i, Bentley has introduced SELECTseries releases of its products, each one of which has provided great new functionality and many new advantages. At the same time, each has stayed true to Bentley’s V8i compatibility commitment, which allows users to take advantage of everything Bentley has to offer in V8i. Bentley, he said, is continuing this commitment going forward with new SELECTseries releases.
The remainder of Bhupinder’s presentation focused on the following newly introduced innovations, each of which further extends Bentley’s V8i advantage:
- Design Synchronization – Design synchronization enables project teams working across disciplines, tools, and geographies to ensure shared design information is up to date, consistent, and meets project standards at all times during the project. The net result is a more fully aligned interdisciplinary design with higher quality and consistent deliverables throughout the process, fewer errors during design review, and superior workflows. This is achieved through a shared repository of common model data for interdisciplinary use, discipline-specific consensus schemas, and common infrastructure elements that are shared across disciplines and design applications. A common interface lets users synchronize their work with the project team to coordinate changes, track revisions, and compare versions from multiple disciplines and applications, while a notification system informs users of changes in real time.
- Building Simulation – Effective building performance simulation requires rigor and accuracy, beyond the simple notional simulation other tools provide. And delivering better performing buildings requires tradeoffs between decisions made in different disciplines. Therefore, establishing design feedback loops among these disciplines is crucial – but can be difficult, especially if the products used are based on different platforms, or are provided by different vendors. Bentley’s new AECOsim family of interdisciplinary information modeling software facilitates this process. AECOsim Building Designer is a single product that provides comprehensive tools for architectural, structural, mechanical, and electrical modeling and documentation. AECOsim Energy Simulator is built from the same platform, and embeds the industry-standard EnergyPlus engine – so it is able to perform rigorous simulation and analysis of building mechanical systems, environmental conditions, and energy performance. While tightly integrated with AECOsim Building Designer, it also is well suited for other workflows, such as those based on Revit, AutoCAD, and ArchiCAD. AECOsim Compliance Manager is a new project management and collaboration SaaS that automates the United States Green Building Council’s (USGBC’s) LEED certification process. It empowers project teams to achieve the maximum LEED certification level more accurately and quickly, and at a lower cost.
- Hypermodels – Hypermodels place drawings into a 3D context, disambiguating and enhancing the clarity of the 3D model. Users can employ hypermodels to navigate the links or callouts with the 3D model as a spatial index. Through the extended dynamic view functionality in the MicroStation platform, users can author hypermodels, establish hyperlinks, and publish hypermodels for review in Navigator. Hypermodels are extremely useful in building design, where plans, elevations, and section details are all embedded in, and navigated from, the 3D model. For designing roads, hypermodels enable plans and profile sheets to be oriented in the alignments to visualize the cross section. They provide “hands-on” instant access to all the relevant information, since the links could be a PDF specification or a maintenance record. Hypermodels will be in the forthcoming MicroStation (SELECTseries 3) release and AECOsim Building Designer.
- Mobility – Growing use of mobile devices has driven demand for effective tools to support mobile workflows. In response to this need, Bentley has introduced its first mobile apps. With the introduction of ProjectWise Explorer for the iPad and Bentley Navigator for the iPad, Bentley enables project participants to package and easily transfer content managed in ProjectWise, including DGN and DWG 3D models and 2D drawings, i-models, specifications in Word, tables in Excel, and photos and PDF files. This capability lets users view, query, and mark up content in a disconnected mode. When users are connected to ProjectWise, the markups are uniquely synchronized to the source content. An associated innovation also shown at Be Together is panoramic navigation, which allows users to navigate models simply by moving an iPad as though it were a window into the model in which the user is virtually immersed. The apps will be available later this year at the Apple App Store, at no cost to ProjectWise Passport holders.
- Markup Synchronization – During design review, project participants typically communicate what needs to be changed by creating markups or redlines, both on paper and digitally. Managing these markups, tracking them, and ensuring they are implemented can present significant challenges. With markup synchronization, markups are automatically associated with the original source document for both digital and paper-based workflows. Using ProjectWise, project managers can validate that appropriate actions were taken to address these markups, significantly reducing project risks.
- PDF Orchestration – Creating accurate, consistent, and complete PDF deliverables that conform to project standards is still a manual, time-consuming effort. PDF orchestration enables project teams to reliably produce compliant and accurate PDF documents on demand and on schedule. Through a licensing agreement with Adobe, Bentley has long embedded PDF libraries into its products, including MicroStation and Navigator. Now, with Bentley’s PDF orchestration, users can establish publishing profiles to define rules such as file naming standards and CAD standards. This capability will be available as part of ProjectWise Dynamic Composition Services, scheduled for release by year’s end.
- Point Cloud Management – Point clouds are now pervasive in information modeling workflows. But working with and sharing point cloud datasets that range from hundreds of megabytes to hundreds of gigabytes can be challenging. Leveraging platform capabilities in raster management, point cloud management in ProjectWise enables teams to take full advantage of point cloud data, eliminating the need for producing and distributing unmanaged copies of large datasets. MicroStation provides the ability to visualize, render, animate, and integrate point cloud data into project documentation, as well as visualize point cloud data in Navigator. Both MicroStation and Navigator can publish point cloud data into i-models. The forthcoming Bentley Descartes V8 i (SELECTseries 3) will introduce advanced point cloud workflows including advanced visualization, classification editing, tiled export, and object extraction capabilities.
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Transmittals – These
are official communications, typically containing design content, between project collaborators. To effectively manage project risks from concept through design and engineering to construction, a transmittals management framework needs to provide:
- the ability to reliably access and include in the transmittal the correct versions of design content from drawings to calculations to specifications;
- the ability to transform and package this content into formats suitable for downstream use;
- a transmittals registry that tracks what’s being delivered to whom and by when;
- a review and approval workflow that tracks all activities related to the transmittal.
Bentley is delivering these capabilities with ProjectWise Transmittals, offered in both AssetWise and ProjectWise.
- Scalable Terrain Models – a revolutionary new technology empowering the high-performance, multi-resolution display of digital terrain models (DTMs) that can cover very large areas and contain billions of points. The models also enable high-resolution image draping, and are scalable from the traditional uses in site and highway design to 3D city models. The new technology takes advantage of the platform’s intrinsic geo-coordination functionality to align data from disparate coordinate systems automatically. It also leverages Bentley’s platform capabilities of raster management such as tiling, overviews, and on-demand paging. Bentley Descartes and Bentley Map provide users the ability to author scalable terrain models from a wide variety of source data, and retain provenance so that the model is easily regenerated when that source data changes.
