| Securing the Visual Mindshare with MicroStation |
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By ConnectPress Senior Editor Rita Stange
Discussing plans for a project with clients is one thing, showing them through visualization really enables people to buy into the design and secure a mindshare, according to Joe Croser, Bentley’s global marketing director, platform products. It also enables designers to get better feedback from their clients, which also results in reducing the cost of delivering the project by eliminating misunderstandings at the beginning of the design stage. At the same time owners and operators can secure funding for the project because the project can fully be represented with a visualization model. Others involved in the project can also proceed with the planning when they’ve seen phase one. Overall, the ability to communicate through visualization streamlines the entire process.
Over the years, MicroStation and has incorporated many visualization tools to improve the way designers can communicate ideas. Croser outlined the history of “visualization firsts” in MicroStation. According to Croser, MicroStation was the first integrated CAD tool to include photo-realistic rendering and animation tools in a complete package, plus, implement the ability to create a panoramic environment. Lastly, Croser noted that MicroStation features fully switchable lights.
Undoubtedly, designers depend on visualization capabilities as part of their everyday workflow. Bentley continues to enhance MicroStation’s features to meet the requests of their users. Croser said the key is to balance the trade-off between high quality and rendering time. Keeping that in mind Bentley plans to focus on several advances in MicroStation Athens.
To improve rendering time, the first thing that Bentley Systems is addressing is the ability to leverage hardware with multi-core processing to balance the load for rendering high quality images. According to Jerry Flynn, Bentley Systems visualization product manager, every copy of MicroStation Athens will have a configurable distributed rendering capability, currently available in XM, but will be much easier to configure than in XM.
CTO Keith Bentley offered some hardware recommendations at the BE Conference last month, which included going with a 64 bit computer with Windows Vista, 4G memory and dual core processor. In terms of a graphics card, he suggested a DX9 Shader Model 3, 256 MB and the latest graphics driver.
Multi-threading will also be featured in Athens to help maintain the load across multiple computers and enable the computer to work faster and do other things at the same time while it’s rendering.
Other features MicroStation users can look forward to in terms of quality are improved lighting and textures for more subtle, realistic images.
You asked for it, you got it. Croser said users requested improved quality of rendering external and internal scenes. Croser ensured that with MicroStation Athens it would be possible to achieve high quality images with the new global illumination tools to capture the subtlety of soft shadows and lighting. In addition, new HDRI technology will enable users to create external images indistinguishable from photographs. The new release will also have a feature called physical sky to further enhance the mood trying to be conveyed.
Perfection may be keen for some, but may cause images to look unrealistic with hard edges and perfect reflections. MicroStation will have more physically correct materials and a blurry reflections feature to provide a more natural feel.
Shadows slowing you down? The shadow process is being moved to the graphics card to improve the direct manipulation models.
Last, for the ultimate interaction experience, look for support with 3D Connexion’s mouse devices to extend the manipulation capabilities.
Many third-party applications are also being used with MicroStation, such as Maxwell Render, ArchVision and others. Flynn vowed that once MicroStation Athens comes out there will be no need to use other rendering applications with MicroStation.
For even more creativity, Bentley offers GenerativeComponents software for exploring different forms and shapes.
Visit the Bentley Systems website for more information http://www.bentley.com/en-US/.
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| Published 2008-06-23 00:00:00 |
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