By Providing Powerful and Intuitive Preprocessing of Point Clouds, These New Offerings Enhance Information Mobility and Increase Value of Point-cloud Data

EXTON, Pa. — January 30, 2013 — Bentley Systems, Incorporated, the leading company dedicated to providing comprehensive software solutions for sustaining infrastructure, today announced the immediate availability of the Bentley Pointools V8i application and two new iWare apps: Bentley Pointools View for point-cloud data visualization and sharing and Bentley Pointools PODcreator for converting laser scans to the POD file format. These offerings provide powerful, intuitive, and seamless preprocessing of point clouds for distribution, facilitating information mobility across the entire infrastructure lifecycle. New Bentley Pointools V8i features include point-cloud differencing and clash detection functionality that makes differences and clashes easy to detect and visualize. This same capability will also soon be available through a Clash Resolution Visa for Bentley’s information modeling, review, and analysis applications, including MicroStation and Bentley Navigator. The new functionality further extends Bentley’s leadership in point-cloud innovations, which also include the ProjectWise Point-cloud Services for on-demand access to point-cloud data.

Nearly all infrastructure projects today require the manipulation of point clouds, and Bentley’s point-cloud products make this task easy. They empower users to leverage the value of point-cloud data in a cost-effective and timely manner for applications ranging from GIS and mapping to surveying, construction status and sequencing, precise "as-builts," manufacturing, utilities, mining, forensics, heritage, and more. Moreover, they lower the barriers to taking best advantage of point clouds by preparing the data once and enabling its reuse anytime.

Jiri Blazek, co-founder, Czech Republic-based BW Precision Systems, said, “Using Bentley’s Pointools we can work with huge point clouds without loss of software performance or data quality. We can work in a number of CAD environments and can create high-resolution orthographic point-cloud images and high-quality videos for presentation purposes. That’s why Pointools has become an integral and essential part of our scan data processing workflow.”

Bruno Van Bastelaere, co-owner, Belgium-based Teccon, said, “The speed at which Bentley’s Pointools is able to render these huge point clouds is amazing. In fact, we sometimes find ourselves panning through a new data set just for the fun of it! Before, good point-cloud software was expensive and limited in the number of points we could handle – a maximum of 50 million on a workstation. Using the free Bentley Pointools View, we can load and visualize a billion plus points on a standard laptop. This has unlocked the potential of laser scanners for us and for our clients, and we are proud to act as resellers for this industry-leading software.”

Bentley Pointools provides the following key advantages:

• increases productivity – Bentley Pointools’ high-performance point-cloud engine with level-of-detail management provides a fluid user experience, even with large data sets. It doesn’t require the decimation of point clouds and enables the visualization of every single point, reducing the time required to work with large point-cloud data sets.
• saves times and enhances data quality – Reuse of the Pointools POD format across the Bentley product portfolio eliminates the need for time-consuming data conversion, thereby streamlining project workflows and reducing the potential for data corruption.
• speeds editing process – Level-of-detail, layer-based editing reduces the time required for editing and segmenting point-cloud data.
• improves visual quality and adds value to point-cloud data – Bentley Pointools’ motion blur and anti-aliasing features produce high-quality final output with little or no aliasing or moiré effects, and the products can be effectively employed with minimum training. This enables users to achieve higher-quality deliverables with no extra effort. Moreover, powerful visualization capabilities, including fly-through movies, model shading capabilities, and high-resolution orthographic and perspective images, further extend the value of point-cloud models.
• speeds clash detection and enhances quality – The point-cloud differencing and clash detection functionality in Bentley Pointools enhances the visual representation of clash results, improving the quality of reporting. This reduces the time users need to interpret results and increases their confidence when checking complex interferences between objects.

The Bentley Pointools View iWare app, offered for no charge at www.bentley.com/iWare, enables the visualization of point-cloud models with billions of points, annotations, and distance measurements, and the production of compelling orthographic and perspective images. This facilitates the sharing of rich point-cloud data with all project stakeholders and makes this process more cost effective.

The Bentley Pointools PODcreator iWare app, also offered for no charge at www.bentley.com/iWare, facilitates the batch processing and conversion of a range of laser scan formats to the POD file format. This enables the one-time creation of POD models for distribution and reuse, reducing the time required for data conversion.