CONNECT still slow

Hi Martin,

You should have used shared cells for all the trees and plants these are what is taking so long to load and display. I would delete all of them compress the file and place shared cells using our Populate tool. The Xfrog trees from European 3 are all to heavy unless the whole point of the render is to see a tree. If you use the ones from European 1 or 2 they are much smaller. In any case using shared cells for these will make your file load and display faster and also they will be replicators in Luxology and render faster as well.

I had David Stradley who works on our display engine have a look and here is what he found. I am not sure where the cells that are on the last two levels in list below came from but they are the slowest.

Thank you Jerry and of course David.

What is the problem :

- we have only Europe 3 pack and a few other trees

- we have landscape plans and need the same trees or similar to put on  

Best is use SharedContent but no trees i need ( some Acers for example )

But many thanks for the tips with shared cells.

Shared cells are like replicators in Luxology when you place a tree for example the first instance would be same as normal cell it would require the same overhead but all others in the scene would be getting their information from that first one. We only then need the transforms like scale, rotation and location for the others much more efficient .

Jerry

Thank you

As i see - i never use Populate yet, it would be nice to add Description to the cells in Populate so you can add name of the tree ( not only Latina for example )  to the set

Okay I would suggest you go here https://learn.bentley.com/app/Public/ViewLearningPathDetails?lpId=105702

Look at the video under Adding Render Ready Content to Your Scene, this was done using V8i but the way it works is the same in CONNECT Edition.

The important thing to know is that we create a depth mesh in memory when you start the tool. If you end the tool after placing a few trees and restart it then those trees will be in the depth mesh and requires more memory. You can use display set to work around this select the ground or elements that the cells are to be placed on and add to a display set then use the populate tool once it has started you can turn display set off for the view and be able to see the previously placed cells without the overhead of having them in the depth mesh.

Cheers,

Jerry

Hi Jerry,

1. Is there any way to replace low LOD cells with higher LOD ones for at render time?

2. I imagine that a lot of users will enventually be using LumenRT side-by-side with Mstn. At the moment, entourage objects like trees would get placed on the LumenRT side. Is there a way to synch the objects placed in LumenRT back in the Mstn model?

You would need this to be able to generate drawings / bills of materials etc. The associated objects would of course be low LOD cells to avoid bogging things down.

Hi Jerry,

1. Is there any way to replace low LOD cells with higher LOD ones for at render time?

2. I imagine that a lot of users will enventually be using LumenRT side-by-side with Mstn. At the moment, entourage objects like trees would get placed on the LumenRT side. Is there a way to synch the objects placed in LumenRT back in the Mstn model?

You would need this to be able to generate drawings / bills of materials etc. The associated objects would of course be low LOD cells to avoid bogging things down.

Hi Dominic,

You can place any plant, tree, car, or for that made any piece of geometry as a cell in MicroStation and if use the naming convention with LRT_ as prefix and if the rest of the name matches content name in LumenRT's content that MicroStation cell will be replaced by the LumenRT version when you export. If you look at these libraries found here C:\ProgramData\Bentley\connectsharedcontent\CellsForLumenRT you will find these names  (where they LRT_ ) will also exist in LumenRT as lob files. That’s the trick really, I could create a cube as a cell name it LRT_Vehicles_Dodge Ram and place the cell in MicroStation and on export the cell will pick up the Dodge Ram. Notice in this case the cell name also has the directory information in the name as well LRT_Vehicles that lob file will be found in C:\ProgramData\Bentley\Bentley LumenRT CONNECT Edition - Update 13\LumenRT Content\LumenRT\Vehicles where we automatically look in the subfolders from here and find the Dodge Ram.lob in the SUVs and Pickups subfolder.

I am sure I have shown the above workflow in multiple SIGs the recordings are on the Learn Server.

To answer your other question, we are discussing ways to add bidirectional syncing of content between MicroStation session and LumenRT

Cheers,

Jerry

Hi Jerry,

Thanks for the info.

1. The Bentley Learn link is a bit slow. Waited half an hour and counting for the page to drop down. Also, slightly surprised that there is no LumenRT section on https://docs.bentley.com/LiveContent/.

In any case,

martinezx said:

- we have only Europe 3 pack and a few other trees

I was actually thinking of objects to be rendered in Mstn. Not sure if you have looked at this, but Mstn is due to incorporate Named Presentations for Cells. I was thinking that the tree cells could be assigned a low LOD NP, and the higher LOD tree cell would only be loaded for rendering in the render Preview Window (a separate process like Luxology?). At render time, you could then do all those GPU tricks like culling etc which you mentioned above to keep things speedy..?

2. Bi-directional synching: YES! As mentioned, we need to preserve and extend the BIM workflow. The old ways of disconnected / unsynched, over-the-wall visualisation 'post-processing' that results in uncoordinated info is a big problem in today's Single-Source-of-Truth production environment. If would be good be able to show your client a pretty render/animation then NOT have to go back to the office to manually reconstruct all those trees etc in the BIM model.

a. dgn<>vob<>lob: I note that Mstn U13 still can't import or export LumenRT lob files.

b. LumenRT: Reference attachment facility. Mstn's hallmark is its Ref attachment tools. This allows it to be an 'integrator' of many different models / information sources. There does not seem to be any equivalent in LumenRT or Vue? It would be great if we could import a dgn. Better yet if we could Ref attach a dgn or i.model and get any updates that way. Any changes to materials etc made in LumenRT would be 'overlaid' onto the changes made in Mstn. There will need to be a means to walk through the changes...

PS: Bi-directional synching would be great boost for OpenSite Designer.

This would in combination with Vue's Plantfactory open the way to the global landscape architecture market, which is currently lacking a viable 3d BIM app.