Empowering Infrastructure Professionals to Develop ‘Environmentally Enlivened’ Designs While Streamlining Their Ability to Communicate
Winning Design Stories to All Stakeholders
PITTSBURGH, Pa., U.S.A. – 57th Annual IHEEP Conference – Sept. 17, 2015 – Bentley Systems, Incorporated, a leading global provider of comprehensive software solutions for sustaining infrastructure, today introduced its new LumenRT CONNECT Edition subscription. With this innovative offering, infrastructure professionals need no longer become computer graphics experts to integrate life-like digital nature into their simulated infrastructure designs and create high-impact visuals for stakeholders. Bentley users engaged in the capture of existing conditions to provide context for their designs can further benefit from reality modeling “enlivened” with digital nature. The new subscription includes Bentley’s LumenRT software plus Azure-cloud access to rich content libraries containing plants, trees, people, vehicles, architectural objects, civil engineering elements, and more.
LumenRT empowers visual optioneering by providing “live,” real-time immersive interaction, animating infrastructure environments with traffic simulations, active characters, wind-swept plants, seasonal trees, rolling clouds, and rippling water. Through the “cinematic” quality of LumenRT scenes and the software’s intuitive, hands-on interface, every infrastructure professional can readily envision his or her proposed design alternatives as they would be experienced in actual operation.
LumenRT also lets infrastructure professionals quickly create photographic images, high definition videos, and real-time immersive presentations of architecture, landscape, urban, and infrastructure designs created with all versions of MicroStation, including V8i SELECTseries and CONNECT Edition. Additionally, LumenRT supports other leading CAD/BIM/GIS systems and 3D formats. LumenRT’s engaging and compelling productions enable clients and other project stakeholders to experience design work in a natural world environment.
Through the new LumenRT CONNECT Edition subscription, users can:
- enhance designs with rich, fully animated environmental elements,
- easily generate attention-grabbing, cinematic-quality images and videos,
- share interactive immersive 3D presentations with any stakeholder using LumenRT LiveCubes,
- leverage Bentley’s ProjectWise Catalog Services CONNECT Edition to select, regularly extend, and share their preferred libraries of natural and engineered digital content (forthcoming).
David Burdick, Bentley industry executive, visualization, said, “When used with Bentley’s innovative infrastructure solutions, our new LumenRT CONNECT Edition subscription gives architects, engineers, and other infrastructure professionals the ability to craft more environmentally-coherent designs. It also provides them with easy-to-use tools to effectively and efficiently communicate those designs to all stakeholders, increasing their chances of garnering buy-in. With this inexpensive and easily accessible subscription, every engineer can improve, present, and share his or her work.”
“Enlivened” Reality Modeling
Used in concert with Bentley’s Acute3D context capture software, the new LumenRT CONNECT Edition subscription will further provide infrastructure professionals with the benefits of reality modeling “enlivened” by digital nature environments. As Bentley Systems Executive Vice President Ray Bentley explained, “With the work we’ve already done to incorporate Acute3D and LumenRT into MicroStation, we can now represent existing conditions in the same way that we, as people, actually experience them. We can juxtapose the simulated infrastructure design with a 3D reality mesh of the stationary existing conditions – captured perfectly with simple digital photographs and enabling continuous surveying – enlivened with LumenRT’s dynamic natural environments. These environments can include living creatures and organisms, such as people and plants, elements in motion, such as rivers and streams, vehicles of all types, clouds in the sky, and more.”
What Users Are Saying About LumenRT
Kurt Stiles, project manager – Visual Engineering Resource Group, Washington State Department of Transportation, said, “LumenRT is our communication tool of choice. It lets us easily produce professional videos and interactive experiences that empower the audience and provide in-depth understanding of our projects.”
J.D. D’Arville, GIS administrator, Alabama Department of Transportation, said about ALDOT’s use of LumenRT on the highly acclaimed Mobile River Bridge project, “LumenRT is a great visual assessment and communication tool that is very easy to use and creates realistic LiveCubes that can be used to sell, or generate ‘buy-in’ for, ALDOT’s projects. With LumenRT, we were able to quickly generate composite interactive 3D visualizations of the bridge and surrounding area using a variety of input sources and models including Esri CityEngine, Bentley’s MicroStation, and Trimble SketchUp models, along with VisSim and MicroStation traffic vehicle animations.”
Bentley added the LumenRT software to its portfolio through its acquisition of e-on software, as announced in a press release issued earlier this week. E-on software, a leader in the creation, simulation, and integration of natural 3D environments, is widely acclaimed in the digital content creation (DCC) market, where its products are a mainstay among computer graphics professionals in the media and entertainment, science, and education industries.
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About Bentley Systems
Bentley Systems is a global leader in providing architects, engineers, geospatial professionals, constructors, and owner-operators with comprehensive software solutions for advancing the design, construction, and operations of infrastructure. Bentley users leverage information mobility across disciplines and throughout the infrastructure lifecycle to deliver better-performing projects and assets. Bentley solutions encompass MicroStation applications for information modeling, ProjectWise collaboration services to deliver integrated projects, and AssetWise operations services to achieve intelligent infrastructure – complemented by worldwide professional services and comprehensive managed services.
Founded in 1984, Bentley has more than 3,000 colleagues in over 50 countries, more than $600 million in annual revenues, and since 2008 has invested more than $1 billion in research, development, and acquisitions.
Additional information about Bentley is available at www.bentley.com and in Bentley’s annual report. For Bentley news as it happens, subscribe to an RSS feed of Bentley press releases and news alerts. Visit The Year in Infrastructure 2015 Conference website for highlights of Bentley’s premier thought-leadership event. To view a searchable collection of innovative infrastructure projects from the annual Be Inspired Awards program, access Bentley’s Infrastructure Yearbooks. To access a professional networking site that enables members of the infrastructure community to connect, communicate, and learn from each other, visit Bentley Communities.
To download the Bentley Infrastructure 500 Top Owners ranking, a unique global compendium of the top public- and private-sector owners of infrastructure based on the value of their cumulative infrastructure investments, visit www.bentley.com/500.
