Feature
Point clouds at Bentley Bentley Systems is very serious about point clouds. In the last twelve months alone it acquired Pointools and added powerful point cloud capabilities to Descartes and ProjectWise. It now regards the laser scanning output to be a fundamental data type, just like DGN. AEC Magazine found out why. by Greg Corke and Martyn Day
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s the AEC industry moves to modelling, analysis and new design processes, 3D data is becoming much more commonplace. But it is not all about Building Information Modelling (BIM). Laser scanners and the 3D point clouds they generate have also become an industry hot topic. While laser scanners are still expensive, many surveyors use them regularly for civil engineering, process plant and architecture projects. CAD software vendors, including Bentley and Autodesk, have added support for point clouds within their core design packages. AEC professionals can import and work with the 3D data. The challenge with point clouds is that they are typically very large. Laser scanners measure millions of 3D points in seconds and to cover a wide area, a number of scans are combined, leading to gigabytes of data per survey. Also, while in a viewer the file may seem like a 3D capture of a site, the data is âdumbâ, just a whole load of raster points. To generate a CAD model from this takes a lot of skill and experience and for a CAD package to properly display and provide editing tools requires serious software engineering. For many years Pointools was one of the leading developers of point cloud display and editing. Its products made light work of manipulating huge point clouds and offered editing tools to manipulate and make sense of all those 3D dots. The driving force behind Pointools was
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Faraz Ravi, a former architect, who got into programming and developed the product alongside a surveying company in North London. In 2011, Bentley Systems acquired Pointools and made Mr Ravi its director of product management for point clouds. This month the AEC editorial team caught up with Mr Ravi, Richard Zambuni, global marketing director, geospatial and utilities, and Benoit Fredericque, Bentley product manager, MicroStation/Descartes Point Cloud, 3D City GIS, to discuss Bentleyâs journey through the point clouds.
Integrating point clouds Like many AEC software developers, it did not take long for Bentley to realise just how important point clouds were going to be in its usersâ workflows. Three years ago it licensed the Vortex engine from Pointools and implemented it inside all its MicroStation-based products. This was a passive implementation. It allowed its users to view and manipulate point clouds inside the familiar MicroStation environment, using what is widely regarded to be the industryâs fastest point cloud engine, but didnât really provide a processing environment. Building on this foundation, Bentleyâs next step was to provide tools to process point clouds within MicroStation. And it decided that Bentley Descartes was going to be the product to do this in. At first look, Descartes may seem like an odd choice. Originally developed as a 2D
Bentley Pointools is designed to work with multi-billion point datasets
raster management, clean up and raster to vector conversion tool, the MicroStation add-on made its name in mapping, GIS and civil engineering. But, once you consider Bentleyâs wider strategy for working with point cloud data, it makes more sense. Bentley sees point clouds as a fundamental data type and wants its users to use point clouds just like any other data type. Just as Descartes first enabled raster data to be used and processed within any MicroStation-based product, the recently launched V8i (SELECTseries 3) release of Descartes now offers similar functionality for point cloud data. In parallel to these new developments in Descartes Bentley was also on the look out for technology to enhance its in-house capabilities. This happened in November 2011 with its acquisition of Pointools. While this brought the Pointools family of point cloud processing software into Bentleyâs product portfolio, it also helped Bentley address the major challenge of how to manage huge point cloud files. On the desktop handling gigabytes of data is not so much of a challenge, but in a server or web-based environment moving these huge files around can take a long time. And sometimes it just isnât practical. Bentley has been working with the Pointools development team on a ProjectWise module called ProjectWise point cloud streaming service, which allows firms to manage, segment and stream point clouds into a client session. This could be www.AECmag.com
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