bentleyuser.org - BE Europe 2007

BE Europe 2007 - Monday Keynotes
by Marc Thomas - 12 June 2007

Monday’s keynotes were dominated by one thing, ATHENS. This, as many of you will already know, is the code word for the next synchronised product release in Q2 2008. One of the major themes for Athens (no more caps!) is Conceptual Design. Bhupinder Singh suggested that new tools should make us able to work faster/better/more effectively or have time to look at more alternatives and arrive at better designs.

Improved modelling tools are a core component, parts of these arrived in the 8.9.3 releases and are now further improved in the 8.9.4 release. Push/Pull (aka Modify Solid Entity) and Draw on Solid tools offer SketchUp style functionality but working on smartsolids rather than SketchUp’s surfaces. Generative Components (GC) is also being seen as a key modelling tool, although we will have to wait and see just how this will be integrated into the rest of Bentley’s arsenal.

Joe Croser compered a line up of Bentley’s top execs including Keith, Ray and Barry Bentley. Keith kicked off running a demo of GC, which is “just so damn cool!”. Whilst this was familiar territory to those of us who have been following GC from its inception, it is good to see GC up on the main stage. He than ran through a slick demo of improvements to the surfacing tools. These have been made smarter, and will infer some of the user’s intentions, particularly regarding surface normal/origin directions resulting in a lot less clicking of the mouse and avoiding those ridiculous twisted surfaces that turn themselves inside out.

The star feature, which kicks SketchUp’s dynamic sectioning abilities into the proverbial cocked hat, is Dynamic Views. Only being shown in AVI at present but still the sexiest feature set to emerge from Exton in a long while.

What are Dynamic Views?
- Have a number of MicroStation views open, in one a rendered isometric, in another a plan, in another a section. Draw a new feature, a wall, a door, in whichever of these views suits your purpose, the others update with the new feature immediately.
- Place a section line through your 3D model in an elevation view, move it up and down watching the isometric view change in real time.
- Elements can be grouped in various ways and displayed differently for presentation and design exploration, slice your project up with section lines, display parts of it fully rendered, the rest translucent or wireframe or any other combination of display modes in the same view.
Dynamic Views are built on the existing view tools, pulling Saved Views, Clip Volumes etc together in a completely new way.

This kind of thing obviously has hardware implications. DirectX 9 is fundamental to this kind of graphic performance so a good graphics card will be increasingly important. Keith Bentley’s suggestion is that we smart buying 64 bit PCs with as much RAM as we can afford both onboard and in the graphics card. Sounds like a 256MB card will be a sensible minimum choice.

Interestingly Stephen Holmes of Cadventure had remarked the day before that their Vista PCs were running Bentley Architecture much faster than Windows XP. This is down to the way that DirectX is integral to Vista, faster DirectX in the operating system will bring corresponding speed increase in DirectX driven applications. Sounds like it is time to take a serious look at Vista! However if you are tempted, be warned that some applications still don’t get on with Vista and driver issues continue to be a problem for systems not built for Vista.