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Bentley Descartes is an MDL application that allows MicroStation users to do many operations on rasters like editing, filtering, georeferencing, and so forth.
Bentley Descartes has become a member of the Bentley's product family when Bentley acquired HMR back in 2000. Before being acquired by Bentley, HMR was the research development group of Groupe Haut-Monts, a large aerial photography acquisition and post processing company from Quebec city. HMR has distinguished itself during the 90 for, amongst other things, being able to display very large images while using very little RAM memory. At the core of Bentley Descartes is the Imagepp library, also developed by HMR.
For MicroStation V8i, Bentley Descartes technologies and functionalities have been leveraged for binary imagery to supersede that which was included in Bentley I/RAS B.
For Bentley Descartes V8i SELECTseries 4 the focus has been put on new functionalities to improve the visualisation, geographic localisation and object extraction from point cloud. As for the Scalable Terrain Model technology recently introduced in Bentley Descartes V8i SELECTseries 3 a couple of new functionalities have been developped for the purpose of doing analysis indirectly or directly on a Scalable Terrain Model.
Here is a summary of the new functionalities developed to help in processing information contained in a point cloud :
Here is a summary of the new analysis related Scalable Terrain Model functionalities :
Bentley Descartes V8i SELECTseries 3 offers brand new tools and functionalities related to 3D city modeling and beyond. Most of the new tools and functionalities can be grouped in one of the two following categories : Point Cloud Processing and Scalable Terrain Modeling.
The functionalities for point cloud processing have been designed to help users to extract meaningful information from a point cloud for modeling and analysis purpose.
Here is a summary of the new functionalities available for point cloud processing.
More information on how to use effectively those functionalities are available on this page.
A scalable terrain model is a terrain model (i.e. : DTM) that can cover a very large territory (e.g. : city, county, country) with low, medium and/or high precision terrain points.
Here is a summary of the new functionalities related to the scalable terrain model advancement.
In Bentley Descartes V8i SELECTseries 2 a whole new set of tools has been added to texture 3D shapes with image data. The new texturing tools have been developped to fulfill the increasing demand of user to be able to create fully textured 3D city model.
The texturing tool includes:
Assign Shape to Image — This tool assigns a shape or shapes to an image or a number of images.
Warp Image to Area — Rectify an image to match the associated shape.
Stretch Image — Stretch images to match the shape upon which it has been mapped.
Convert to Advanced Texture — Convert images to Advanced Textures for higher resolution display.
Start Editing — Temporarily convert an Advanced Texture as a Raster Attachment to make it editable.
End Editing — Convert the Raster Attachment back to an Advanced Texture with its original parameters.
Convert to Texture — Convert images to standard textures for conventional rendering.
More information on those tools are available on the Bentley Descartes - Raster Texturing Wiki page.
The following describes the major changes in this version:
The following describes the principal functions of Bentley Descartes and provides links to the associated Wiki pages.
Raster editing refers to the modification of the pixels' value of a raster and includes operation such as: touch-ups, stamping vectors, cutting, copying, pasting, transforming local areas, and masking color. Visit Bentley Descartes - Raster Editing for more information about the raster editing capabilities of Bentley Descartes.
Raster enhancements refers to the set of functions that are capable of improving the general appearance of a raster such as refining or smoothing edges. For more information on the raster enhancement capabilities of Bentley Descartes, please visit Bentley Descartes - Raster Enhancement .
Raster transformation refers to the set of tools that are modify the shape and the content of a raster. Additional information can be found in this page: Bentley Descartes - Raster Transformation
Raster registration refers to the set of functions that are used to specify a geospatial location for its raster. More information on the specifics of raster registration can be found on this page: Bentley Descartes - Raster Registration
Seamless mosaics can be created by utilizing specialized functions described on this page: Bentley Descartes - Mosaic Rasters
Raster vectorization refers to a set of tools that are capable of detecting pixel formation in a raster and converting those pixels to a vector element. All this and more is described in the following link: Bentley Descartes - Raster Vectorization
While no longer a Descartes function, raster draping refers to ability of draping a raster onto a 3D surface. Please visit the following page for additional information: Bentley Descartes - Image Draping
Bentley Descartes provides the ability to display the height field of DEM Rasters and is described on the following page: Bentley Descartes - DEM Raster Display
Bentley Descartes provides the ability to read raster stored in an Oracle database, which is described on the following page: Bentley Descartes - Raster From Oracle Database
Bentley Descartes has many others functionalities which improve the task of working with raster. Those functionalities are described on the following page: Bentley Descartes - Miscellaneous Raster Functionalities