Bentley has just released the latest version of its flagship product, MicroStation, along with a comprehensive portfolio of applications for infrastructure. AEC Magazine interviewed BentleyÝs chief technology officer (CTO), Keith Bentley, on the advances made in this new version, which is called V8i.

Martyn Day: The PR around MicroStation V8i claims itÝs the biggest release of MicroStation in the companyÝs history. The same was said of V8 when it was launched. What have been the challenges?

Keith Bentley, chief technology officer, Bentley.

Keith Bentley: From this point on, I think each of our releases will be Ùthe biggest releaseÝ for us as we grow and make more acquisitions. One thing about this release compared to, say, MicroStation V8 XM Edition, is that while there was a lot of big stuff in V8 XM, some of its main benefits were for our applications. V8i is the companyÝs largest effort to date to get together the most programmers releasing the most code, affecting the majority of our products, being deployed by the largest number of our users.

So, it has been a concerted release with many more moving parts that all had to come together. I think our users will end up looking at V8i as a major breakpoint in the portfolio of Bentley products. In the V8i portfolio we have a lot of products that are used by a lot of people, and the products are interconnected. I donÝt necessarily expect immediate adoption of V8i, because I donÝt think overnight everyone is going to say, ÙI have to upgrade everything to V8i.Ý However, when an organisation does say, ÙNow is the time for us to move to V8i,Ý they wonÝt have anywhere near the issues they had in the past making a number of products work together. V8i is a big release for us. IÝm sure in our press communications we say this about every release, but I really do look at this release as a big one!

MD: With the release sounding like such an effort, customers may worry about the upheaval of upgrading.

KB: As you can imagine, IÝve been through a lot of releases and talked to many users about trying to encourage people to upgrade. As you know, in every software upgrade there comes some pain and some gain ± hopefully more of the latter. In V8i, I think the gain-vs-pain ratio is very high. For example, I think the pain point addressed by the ProjectWise ÙDelta File Transfer,Ý and the pain of slow file transfer that it solves, is bigger than the feature sets of a lot of previous generations. Companies can deploy V8i and literally the next day their projects are going to run much smoother. Moreover, the features and benefits in MicroStation V8i translate into profitability for our customers. WeÝre very excited about that.

BentleyÝs work on the Massar ChildrenÝs Discovery Centre. Courtesy Henning Larsen Architects.

MD: The MicroStation release has been boiled down to five main features: intuitive design modelling, interactive dynamic views, intrinsic geo-coordination, integrated Print Organizer, and iterative Luxology rendering. WhatÝs new, whatÝs updated, and whatÝs been licensed.

KB: I think each one has important benefits to offer our users and thereÝs a combination of new, updated, and licensed. For example, we licensed the rendering engine from Luxology. The integration of that technology with MicroStation and with our vertical applications is going to change our market in much the same way that the digital camera changed the film market.

Twenty years ago, there were professional photographers, who were very good at using a 35mm camera and at developing their own film. Photography was an art, and when you saw a really cool picture you were impressed.

Nowadays, people take a hundred pictures and if one of them turns out well they toss the other 99 and, in their minds, they are photographers. In terms of the way visualisation will be used in AEC projects, having something thatÝs directly and easily accessible to all users ± and fast ± will fill an important need. One of the key features of Luxology is that it does a really good job amazingly fast. So, like with a digital camera, I think a lot more people will use it and become good at it.

The other items in the list of features are improvements or brand new content. Take, for example, dynamic views. Most people will compare dynamic views to Revit drawing extractions or synchronisation techniques. In differentiating between what weÝve done with dynamic views and what Revit does, you need to understand that dynamic views use the same referencing capabilities that MicroStation has pioneered for a long time. The most important thing about that is the biggest downside with Revit: When youÝre trying to keep your drawings in synch with your model, it all has to be stored in one place ± youÝre always facing a limit of how big a project can be or how distributed a project can be. With MicroStation, you can subdivide the project whatever way you want and have as many files as you like. And with V8i, weÝve taken the best of both worlds.

If youÝre in a session of MicroStation and have, say, 30±40 files that are all being referenced, and you need to edit some of them, in the past with MicroStation and AutoCAD there was one lock on one file. Now we can modify multiple files and have a transaction that spans multiple, independently lockable files. This is a big thing. You can have a large project spread across multiple offices and multiple computers and files.

MD: Tell me a bit more about the new conceptual modelling tools ¾ what have you done there to expand MicroStationÝs capabilities?

KB: We recognise that there are some incredible opportunities for using GenerativeComponents with other modelling tools: drawing modelling, component modelling, parametric modelling, even sketchy-type modelling tools. The cool thing is, we have made them all work together. In V8i, our objective was to make it so that in a distributed team, where people focus on aspects of the project using each of those techniques, when everyone comes together to collaborate, their work is all shared in DGN files.

In the past, weÝve had people spending resources using a tool like SketchUp. SketchUp is a great tool, and itÝs been used by a number of our users. People say to us, ÙCanÝt you make SketchUp work better with MicroStation?Ý and, yes, we do a pretty decent job of importing and exporting SketchUp files. But, weÝre going to make those people much more productive by enabling them to use the powerful referencing, raster, point cloud, etc. tools in MicroStation. In other words, they can now use in their conceptual modelling, all the features that drive their decision to pick MicroStation for their engineering project.

From an interface perspective, the goal was to make V8i easy to learn and use, for the people who say, ÙI donÝt want to learn MicroStation,Ý or ÙI donÝt want to install every application on my desktop; I just want to use SketchUp.Ý So we focussed on coming up with ways that you can use MicroStation and turn off all the features you donÝt care about and just use it in a simplified way. Similarly, for users of GenerativeComponents, in MicroStation they are going to find themselves in that nice, easy environment, sketching in 3D mode, until they get to the point where they want to add more precision and use some feature modelling. Once theyÝve crossed into the solid modelling world, then they can use solid modelling techniques.

With V8i, with improved DGN referencing techniques, it will all seem pretty seamless. The two main scopes of our company ¾ comprehensive and integration ¾ are coming together in this world of design modelling.