Challenge to you all working with Descartes/Point cloud/stm with draped raster models, that have/had trouble to create an presentation to use with Adobe reader as an 3d pdf output

Hi Tom,

While I'm not aware of all discussions regarding the publishing of STM and point cloud I think that technically the big challenge with STM and point cloud data is that they can be very huge in size.

How do you publish very huge dataset? One solution is to decrease the resolution, but often having a publishable delivery with a manageable size and an acceptable resolution is not possible.

Probably the best solution for publishing very huge dataset is to stream them. Point cloud can be streamed using ProjectWise and if you select the Keep Original option for point cloud when creating your i-model the ProjectWise URL of the point cloud should be kept in the i-model. That being said ensuring that the ProjectWise URL be resolved is another issue which would need to be asserted with that streaming strategy.

As for using another media I doubt that the result that can be achieved with another media be better than one is currently available using an i-model and the free software available for handling them (see www.bentley.com/.../free+software).

Finally draped raster applied on the STM is not yet supported for an i-model because it wasn't considered a top priority feature for the first release of STM.

Thanks,

Mathieu

Thanks Mathieu

Questions that needs to be sorted out (in my mind) about this issue if no god solution excist.

1. Is there or have there been any discussions/ plans in your team about solving these issues (deliver the results of Products created in Descartes/Point cloud/stm with draping with other media than MS)

2. Why doesn´t i-models suport draped stm:s (i-model has been around for long time now)

3. Could there be som other "free" open media type formats that could be better suited for these kind of publishing Products that could be added to descarted.

Starting with these 3 to begin with.

//Tom

Hi Tom,

No, unfortunately the draped raster is not the same element type as regular raster, in fact, it is not even an element, but materials created on the fly under the hood. So unless there is an option related to the texture resolution of material there is not much that can be done for the draped raster part, thus my proposed workaround.

I'll check with one of my colleague who knows better then me the 3D print side of the equation. Maybe he will have some suggestions.

Thanks,

Mathieu

Hi Mathieu

No I have not tested with lower resolution, that should be the LAST thing I do.

What I have tested is to lower the quality in pdfcfg file and also output dpi to low as 75dpi but all my effort has resulted in a reduzed output size of Little over 50% (54 mb) of the original 100mb. I don´t have any more ideas it seems that the draped raster doesn´t change whatever settings I try to use.

The settings/options in printer manager, is there some of those that has any effects on draped raster.

Question:

Is the draped raster the same element type as regular raster.

any more ideas??

//Tom

Hi Tom,

My first thought was to suggest the use of our i-model plugin for Acrobat Reader (see www.bentley.com/.../imodel+plugin+adobe+reader.htm for more information), but draped raster on a STM is currently not supported by an i-model.

I'm not really sure how the 3D PDF print process works but doing some quick tests I have found that most of the time is taken by the printing of the draped raster data. Have you tried using a low resolution representation of your raster data (i.e. : could be generate with the Descartes' merge tool) instead of the original raster data for the print?

HTH,

Mathieu