A useful software to advance infrastructure, ContextCapture includes Cloud processing services, a mobile app, and photo planning for Bentley’s applications. Last November, the company had updated ContextCapture to process point Clouds in addition to photos when generating a 3D reality mesh. Now, a new update enables users to input aerial and mobile lidar — including point Clouds generated by indoor mapping devices.
Bentley’s Senior Director of Software Development for Reality Modelling Francois Valois explains, “Users can now capture data with a wide variety of devices, each suited for a different purpose. For example, if you want to capture the existing conditions of a train station, you could use aerial lidar for the wider context, drone photography for high-quality color visuals of the structures, and a combination of photos and indoor lidar to capture the indoor conditions. After capturing, you can process your data sets with ContextCapture and it combines them into a single 3D reality mesh.”
Valois further says that after capturing, you can process your data sets with ContextCapture and it combines them into a single 3D reality mesh. This file format gives you the best of both photogrammetry and lidar in one place. “We’re able to increase the accuracy of the photos based on the point Clouds, but there are also places where the photo might be a better fit, depending on the constraints. Combining the two, you get a hybrid 3D reality mesh that is very easy to consume and use for different engineering purposes,” he adds.
ContextShare extends Bentley’s ProjectWise connected data environment to securely manage, share, and stream reality meshes, and their input sources, across project teams and applications. Navigator Web is a new web application that delivers high-performance streaming of very large reality meshes through the browser to desktop or mobile devices.
