PoinTools review

Hi all,

Just got Bentley poinTools trial, and here is what I found from a couple of hours test-drive - from a visualization point of view:

I guess you have to draw your own conclusions - as with anything - and Bentley offers a 30-day free trial for just that.
I personally really want to love poinTools, and look forward to any future development.

I plan to edit this post as I discover more.

The good

Fairly easy to get something out the door! Offers more options than microStation does!

  • Setting up a camera for rendering a fly-through is amazing! I come from a microStation visualization background where it is almost impossible to control the camera, so that was a really nice find. Get this into the mothership ASAP!

  • You can directly export side-by-side 3D, Alpha maps and Depth maps (fixed gradient from min. to max. distance only) - I already pitched the idea of 3D movies to the guys upstairs and they loved it!

  • It has a nice motion blur.

  • It's possible to fake fog-of-war (linear "fog")

  • ...and probably a lot of technical options that I don't know how to appreciate :)

The bad

You will end up wishing it was a better quality product - when it comes to visualization purposes.

  • No DGN support! Wow.. Bentley not supporting their own format? It does read Autodesk and what not.

  • Poor camera control: No direct control of neither how it clips the cloud, nor the field-of-view. These are available in the animation timeline only.

  • Just one build in shader: Not nearly enough control of the so-called shader that can be mixed with the pointcloud. You basically just have control of a gradient that is applied top down. Useless unless you need topography I guess.

  • Slow: Uses one CPU only. Maxed out at 6-12% here while rendering. Knowing I could have been done with my work eight times faster is really gonna get to me in the long run! The speed of saving a pointCloud image from microStation seems to be alot faster. Even at at mere 800x500 pixels some frames took more than 5 seconds to render. In microStation I save the pointcloud images to +2500 pixels and it usually takes just 1-2 seconds.

  • The render size is limited to one of the build in windows! Never have I heard of anything so rediculus. Why are you unable to render to memory? Are you using print-screen to store the images? If you need a HD movie, you need an UHD monitor. If you like to render in twice the resolution.. you'd need to wait for the 8K monitors.

    There might be something hidden in the error message. It says something about "draft" rendering.. I need to RTFM - all 100 pages.

  • Not enough control over the background color. There are some fixed color gradients such as morning and evening, and they don't even work together with the fog.

  • Fixed pointsize only. No individual control over the pointsizes used on different clouds. Also, no automated pointsize depending on the distance to the points. And also forget about animating the pointsize as the pointsizes only animate in integer steps.

..and the ugly

Generally errors and that unfinished feeling all over.

  • Lack of control. Missing parameter "FAR CLIP" in the animation settings, so you never know when the pointcloud is being clipped. The Far clip seems to be related to the NEAR clip, so by upping this, you have semi-control of the far-clip. None of these can be set as a general setting.

  • Yet another navigation system.. The navigation is to put it mildly, annoying and odd. Lots of other softwares out there provides simply mousefriendly 3D navigation with no hazzle. Why not lLearn from that? That said, once you remember the actions you need to do to navigate, it is quite be possible to get where you want to go, and that is something.

  • When you render a movie there will be errors in the top of each frame if you follow the guidelines in the program. The view with the pointcloud needs to be higher than your aspect ratio.

  • Aspect ratio ignored. It is very easy to save images that are distorted very badly. You are forced to enter the dimesion of you image before you choose the size of the pointcloud you want to store.

  • No normals on your pointcloud? Well, then there is no lighting for you!

Please challenge my observations! I soo want to keep using pointools!

Regards,
Torben

  • (Turns out I wont be editing as that causes the post to dissapear for days)

    Further investigations, all in the "Ugly and Bad" category this time:

    Error in display: From time to time huge blocks of a pointcloud begin to render with a very low density. Nothing but a restart of poinTools fixes this. This error shows when you save an image!!

    Error in image size: Be very careful when you want to save an image as some times the program decides that the size of the image should be +100.000 pixels wide!! A way to fix this is by going first to the "Area of interest" screen, click "All", and then go back to the save image screen and click the "1:1" button.. and then save the image.

    Settings are not saved: Left of the animation timeline you can toggle parameters off if you don't need/use them. These toggles are not saved, so each time you continue on your project, you have to set them again.

    Adaptive pointsize not working: According to the manual, there is a toggle to have adaptive pointsize for when you are too close for points to not leave huge gaps in the image. Activating this setting does absolutely nothing at all.

    Frame rate is low: According to the manual there is "no need to go above 30fps". That is not true. I render at minimum 50fps for an ultra clear and dreamlike presence. Try it. It's like night and day. Actually, anything below 60fps can be regarded as stop motion when it comes to suspension of disbelief.

    3D rendering is limited: There was no way to render both left and right images in one go. It takes TWO complete renders to achieve that. I have not tried it yet. Also there is no way to have direct output to two solid 3D images. Neither side by side or over under.

    Layer coloring is limited: All you can do is blend a solid color with your pointclouds. No transparency, no contrast/brightness/hue controls. Unless you apply those to the actual points.

    Environment automation is a problem: The FOG gradient is depending on the front clip of the camera, and not the actual distance from the camera location. This interferes with the fact that the back clip is controllable only by the front-clip, and in effect makes the whole fog-of-war too uncontrollable for real use.

    System: Win7 64bit 16GB Ram - microStation V8i SS3 08.11.09.578. + PoinTools CONNECT. - Intel i7-4800MQ CPU@2.70GHz, 4 core / 8 Logic proc.

  • Hi Torben,

    Thanks for your comments, it's interesting to get the views from a MicroStation-visualisation expert.  I'll try to answer your points:

    No DGN support! - yeah, this is top of the 'to-do' list! i-model support is planned, but not a simple fix.  There are work-arounds we can discuss

    Poor camera control: I recommend setting 1 animation keyframe and making adjustments like near-plane and FoV here, this will then stick when navigating in the view.  

    Just one build in shader: you can change the direction of the Plane Shader, the size and position, and the ramp it uses, I would welcome ideas on how this could be improved.

    Slow: Rendering only uses 1 core, which today seems crazy.  however, I don't find that render times are particularly slow.

    The render size is limited to one of the build in windows! Never have I heard of anything so rediculus. Why are you unable to render to memory? Are you using print-screen to store the images? If you need a HD movie, you need an UHD monitor. If you like to render in twice the resolution.. you'd need to wait for the 8K monitors.

    Try the Antialiased renderer, you can render upto something like 7000px across (it depends on your machine, this is what my laptop tops out at), and if this is not enough you can use the tiled renderer, so in theory you could render up to 70,000px across

    There might be something hidden in the error message. It says something about "draft" rendering.. I need to RTFM - all 100 pages.

    see above

    Not enough control over the background color. There are some fixed color gradients such as morning and evening, and they don't even work together with the fog.

    True, backgrounds are limited to fog, or solid, or gradient, or sky.  fog with another setting is a good idea, would be happy to add this to the wish list

    Fixed pointsize only - You can assign a point size to each POD in the animation timeline.  Add an Animation Controller to each object and then set the desired point size in the timeline.  Things like this and the FoV are only present in the timeline as they were only pertinent when rendering animations.  But I see that it would make sense to have the same options outside of the animation system.

    Lack of control. Missing parameter "FAR CLIP" in the animation settings, so you never know when the pointcloud is being clipped. The Far clip seems to be related to the NEAR clip, so by upping this, you have semi-control of the far-clip. None of these can be set as a general setting. I've never had an issue with far clip, it's usually far enough away that it doesn't clip anything, but again would be a valid request for inclusion in a future version.

    Yet another navigation system.. The navigation is to put it mildly, annoying and odd. Lots of other softwares out there provides simply mousefriendly 3D navigation with no hazzle. Why not lLearn from that? That said, once you remember the actions you need to do to navigate, it is quite be possible to get where you want to go, and that is something.

    Everything is different, right? I find it very intuitive, but I know how frustrating it is to remember the controls of a new program!  we have used this system since Pointools first came about 10 years ago and couldn't just change it now.

    When you render a movie there will be errors in the top of each frame if you follow the guidelines in the program. The view with the pointcloud needs to be higher than your aspect ratio.

    This is an issue with specific codecs and the draft renderer IIRC, you won't see this using the Antialiased renderer.

    Aspect ratio ignored. It is very easy to save images that are distorted very badly. You are forced to enter the dimesion of you image before you choose the size of the pointcloud you want to store.

    Not sure i follow you here, can you post a picture?

    No normals on your pointcloud? Well, then there is no lighting for you!

    As I understand it normals are required to be able to light a point

    Error in display: From time to time huge blocks of a pointcloud begin to render with a very low density. Nothing but a restart of poinTools fixes this. This error shows when you save an image!!

    This could be due to a few factors, but nothing we can't resolve

    Error in image size: Be very careful when you want to save an image as some times the program decides that the size of the image should be +100.000 pixels wide!! A way to fix this is by going first to the "Area of interest" screen, click "All", and then go back to the save image screen and click the "1:1" button.. and then save the image.

    I haven't come across this issue

    Settings are not saved: Left of the animation timeline you can toggle parameters off if you don't need/use them. These toggles are not saved, so each time you continue on your project, you have to set them again.

    Needs to be reported as a bug

    Adaptive pointsize not working: According to the manual, there is a toggle to have adaptive pointsize for when you are too close for points to not leave huge gaps in the image. Activating this setting does absolutely nothing at all.

    Adaptive point size is only seen when rotating, panning etc.  as you move the point cloud density is reduced (depending on your settings) and the points are made bigger to reduce the visual effect of the drop out.

    Frame rate is low: According to the manual there is "no need to go above 30fps". That is not true. I render at minimum 50fps for an ultra clear and dreamlike presence. Try it. It's like night and day. Actually, anything below 60fps can be regarded as stop motion when it comes to suspension of disbelief.

    I will try it, i always tell users to render at 25fps, if you go to 50fps you are doubling render time.  

    3D rendering is limited: There was no way to render both left and right images in one go. It takes TWO complete renders to achieve that. I have not tried it yet. Also there is no way to have direct output to two solid 3D images. Neither side by side or over under.

    Agreed, it takes a bit of time and commitment to get a side-by-side 3d movie, but it's worth it! A possible improvement for a future release.

    Layer coloring is limited: All you can do is blend a solid color with your pointclouds. No transparency, no contrast/brightness/hue controls. Unless you apply those to the actual points.

    Yes, it's just to give an indication of which points sit on which layer, I doubt it will ever be as sophisticated as a CAD package's Level/Layer system.

    Environment automation is a problem:

    again this is something I would like to look at with you.

     

    If you have time, Torben, can we arrange an online meeting to discuss your issues further?


    This is a test

  • Hi Dan, thank you very much for your reply!

    I will bve most happy to join you in a meeting, online or otherwise. Due to my workload however, it will have to wait a while. I need to read up on your post, but needed to add a bit more to this thread:

    The good

    It is fast! Saving a movie with the "antialiased" settings seems to have increased the renderspeed. I managed to make 3 minutes of raw movie in just under two hours. I'd like to see any other Bentley renderproduct deliver this speed! The resulting movie was well recieved all around! Thank you PoinTools! :)

    Light point editing is ok. I needed to remove odd bits and pieces, and found it fairly easy using the shape tool and layers masking. I still wish I could import a bunch of solids and simply have their volume remove the points I don't need. That way I could reuse the clipping information over and over and it would actually be accurate.

    The Bad

    Does not suspend sleepmode. The PC entered sleepmode in the middle of rendering, and poinTools crashed when returning from sleepmode. I had to disable all powermanagement! I might be to blame for the sleepmode - I don't know - but not the crashing.

    Shortcuts don't work here.The shortcuts are not working with a danish keyboard layout. I don't even have a kye for the "/" character, so I cannot start/stop the movie. I did not see a way to change the shortcuts.

    Later,
    Torben

    System: Win7 64bit 16GB Ram - microStation V8i SS3 08.11.09.578. + PoinTools CONNECT. - Intel i7-4800MQ CPU@2.70GHz, 4 core / 8 Logic proc.

  • Interesting thread- thanks for posting.
    I posted somewhere here a week or so ago regarding that lack of DGN support when there is DWG support.
    Blind Freddy saw that glaring issue.
    :-)
  • you can edit the shortcuts, go here: C:\Program Files (x86)\Bentley\Bentley Pointools V8i\config and open standard.shortcuts in notepad


    This is a test