Reality modelling is becoming a major contributor to infrastructure project delivery and asset performance, and many infrastructure organisations, as well as owner-operators, are exploring new technologies and methods of adopting the practice. These professionals are realising that capturing the existing conditions of a project site is essential to providing the foundational input to make informed decisions and understand the context within which the asset will be designed, built, and operated.
Among the applications available is Bentley’s ContextCapture, which uses 3D photogrammetry to quickly turn photographs taken using a mobile device and/or point cloud data into extremely detailed 3D models. This results in a navigable 3D engineering-ready reality mesh, with fine and photorealistic detail, sharp edges, and precise geometric accuracy that can be used throughout the design, construction, operations, and inspection lifecycle of the asset.
The highly detailed models can be of any size or resolution, up to city scale, and created much more quickly with ContextCapture than with other technologies. Moreover, ContextCapture ensures interoperability that allows project teams to easily and consistently publish and share reality modelling information on desktop and mobile devices. The information can also be shared in many formats, including natively within MicroStation for use in any engineering or GIS workflow.
For users of Bentley Descartes CONNECT Edition, its native support of reality meshes allows users to directly integrate models produced with ContextCapture into engineering, architectural, and geospatial workflows with precise real-world context to improve decision making. Descartes users can then combine reality meshes with other data types including point clouds, raster, and models. This data can then be used in combination with BIM processes, and geospatial and CAD data in many popular formats to produce a wide range of design deliverables.
Bentley Descartes’ feature extraction capabilities enable users to extract breaklines and produce digital terrain models from reality meshes or point clouds, dramatically speeding these tasks and increasing project quality.
Bentley Descartes CONNECT Edition can also perform thematic visualisations, changing the display of models based on their inherent properties, such as slope, elevation, and aspect angle. Users can also conduct solar studies and shading analysis, and publish models so that they are visualised in the real-time rendering environment of Bentley LumenRT.
Dustin Parkman, VP, civil and reality modelling with Bentley Systems, said, “Bentley Descartes CONNECT Edition is the key to effectively realising the full potential of reality meshes within engineering workflows. Bentley Descartes is critical for engineers, architects, and owner-operators in that it makes reality data seamlessly accessible for use throughout the infrastructure lifecycle.”
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