Bentley Advances the Power, Accessibility, and Pervasiveness of Visualization and Virtual Reality for Infrastructure Projects

Bentley Systems announces the availability of new capabilities for MicroStation CONNECT Edition that significantly advance the visualization and enhanced reality workflows for anyone involved in infrastructure modeling workflows. Key among the new enhancements is the incorporation of Bentley LumenRT Designer as a no-cost companion install, enabling every user of any Bentley CONNECT Edition design modeling application, such as MicroStation, AECOsim Building Designer, OpenRoads, and OpenPlant, to take advantage of real-time visualization capabilities to complement their existing extensive rendering and animation capabilities. Bentley LumenRT Designer offers a subset of Bentley LumenRT’s extensive environmental content library of vegetation, vehicles, and characters.

For more advanced visualization workflows, users can leverage Bentley LumenRT CONNECT Edition. Additional capabilities enable users to output even higher resolution images and Ultra HD videos as well as produce models for use on virtual reality devices such as Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Samsung Gear VR to provide both phone-based static VR and dazzling immersive VR environments. It also includes API integration with Bentley design modeling applications, Revit 2017, Archicad 20, Sketchup 2017, and City Engine 2016.1. Using immersive VR, users can:

·  Navigate and explore models in immersive 3D

·  Teleport to any point of view

·  Touch objects to view BIM information

·  Create immersive walk-thru training videos

MicroStation and Bentley LumenRT also provide native support for scalable meshes. Users can leverage Bentley’s ProjectWise ContextShare service to share and stream reality meshes for use in design and visualization workflows.

Speaking about the value of Bentley LumenRT in virtual reality workflows, Terry Walters of H.W. Lochner said, “Having tested numerous gaming platforms and other products, I can say with certainty that Bentley LumenRT’s ability to drive the VR environment right from our desktop cannot be matched in our industry at this time.”

Santanu Das, SVP, design modeling with Bentley Systems, said, “Bentley believes that enabling more users to leverage their design models to easily and quickly produce stunning and clear project visualizations, including for use with virtual reality devices, is another way to help ensure that users can realize a greater return on their investment in BIM workflows.”