The age of the reality mesh Ever since Bentley Systems acquired Acute3D in February 2015, it has forged ahead with Reality Capture, integrating key technologies into its foundation MicroStation platform and beyond by martyn day and greg corke
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t the Year In Infrastructure (YII) conference in 2015, Bentley Systems showed exactly how viable reality computing techniques had become, showing off ContextCapture, a new software product based on the Acute3D technology it had acquired earlier that year. Starting with hundreds or thousands, of photos captured by drone or taken by hand, ContextCapture automatically produces a detailed 3D reality mesh. In other words, an engineering ready 3D model complete with textured photos. In just one year, Bentley has come a long way. It has decided that reality meshes are 28
Summer 2017 special edition
now a new fundamental dataset for MicroStation – in addition to 2D vector lines, 3D solids, 2D raster and 3D point clouds. It has deeply integrated the reality mesh capabilities into its platform stack and already developed applications for users to integrate mesh work into their design and documentation processes. In the early days of reality capture, it felt that Bentley competitor Autodesk, was pushing the boundaries, having previously licensed a past version of the Acute3D technology, as well as develop ing point cloud applications such as Recap and Memento. However, Autodesk has a disparate array of products – Revit,
AutoCAD, Civil 3D, Inventor, Fusion and Infraworks, which appears to have slowed deployment and direction. Now Bentley appears to have taken the initiative. At this year’s YII conference, it demonstrated OpenRoads Designer, an incredibly dynamic environment for civil design which felt as graphically-rich as a game but generated road designs with cut, fill, 2D documentation and even enabled live ‘optioneering’. Now that reality mesh technology is in MicroStation, it seems every Bentley vertical application will get a ‘Designer’ variant, with versions for the building design application AECOsim soon to be in public www.AECmag.com
