It is used in workflows where a combination of point cloud and CAD geometry models are required. It is used when workflows are more point cloud-centric or when data needs to be prepared for downstream use.ĭescartes runs inside MicroStation, Bentley’s design and engineering environment. Pointools is a standalone application for clean up and processing of point clouds.
This happened in November 2011 with its acquisition of Pointools. In parallel to these new developments in Descartes Bentley was also on the look out for technology to enhance its in-house capabilities. 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. But, once you consider Bentley’s wider strategy for working with point cloud data, it makes more sense.īentley sees point clouds as a fundamental data type and wants its users to use point clouds just like any other data type. Originally developed as a 2D raster management, clean up and raster to vector conversion tool, the MicroStation add-on made its name in mapping, GIS and civil engineering. And it decided that Bentley Descartes was going to be the product to do this in.Īt first look, Descartes may seem like an odd choice. It allowed its users to view and manipulate point clouds inside the familiar MicroStation environment, using what is widely regarded to be the industry’s fastest point cloud engine, but didn’t really provide a processing environment.īuilding on this foundation, Bentley’s next step was to provide tools to process point clouds within MicroStation. Three years ago it licensed the Vortex engine from Pointools and implemented it inside all its MicroStation-based products.
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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 users’ workflows. 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 Bentley’s journey through the point clouds. In 2011, Bentley Systems acquired Pointools and made Mr Ravi its director of product management for point clouds.
The driving force behind Pointools was Faraz Ravi, a former architect, who got into programming and developed the product alongside a surveying company in North London.
Its products made light work of manipulating huge point clouds and offered editing tools to manipulate and make sense of all those 3D dots. 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.įor many years Pointools was one of the leading developers of point cloud display and editing. Also, while in a viewer the file may seem like a 3D capture of a site, the data is ‘dumb’, just a whole load of raster points. 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. The challenge with point clouds is that they are typically very large. Bentley Pointools is designed to work with multi-billion point datasets
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