Bentley’s Forthcoming MicroStation Release to Incorporate Luxology’s Photorealistic Rendering Engine

The super-fast Luxology rendering engine, combined with breakthrough “compression” techniques for replicated geometry in MicroStation, will allow users to generate images and animations with life-like detail, and uniquely enable designers to make real-time decisions from near-real-time rendering within interactive AEC workflows. Unlike other approaches currently available, no time is wasted transferring datasets between the design environment and a separate – and often costly – rendering system requiring special training. As a result, world-class photorealistic rendering has finally become a readily accessible tool for virtually every AEC practitioner and project, empowering design teams to:

• Immediately visualize and further refine potential designs to provide better-performing infrastructure,
• More easily secure stakeholder buy-in on concept and final design work with high-impact presentations as a routine by-product of their work.

Commenting on the new agreement, Brad Peebler, Luxology President and Founder, said, “Bentley put us through a rigorous comparison test and we feel fortunate for this opportunity to work with one of the AEC community’s leading providers of software solutions and products. We look forward to seeing how Bentley and MicroStation users take advantage of the rendering power we are providing.”

Bentley Systems Executive Vice President Ray Bentley said, “We’ve always delivered an outstanding set of visualization tools integrated with our MicroStation design platform, and have taken them to an even higher level of flexibility and ease of use in our forthcoming release. Now we can offer users the capability to create visualizations of unsurpassed realism in a lot less time by choosing the Luxology engine from among the many rendering options in MicroStation. In fact, the Luxology engine is so fast that our users will be able to create animations in the time it takes most renderers to create a single image. The new renderer will be available as a simple menu option within our interface, and will not require separate training or specialized hardware.”

The Luxology engine is a fast ray-tracer that can render millions of polygons at enormous frame sizes. In addition, it is highly scalable on multi-core systems and can speed the rendering of immensely comprehensive scenes using up to 32 cores per workstation.

Features of this technology that contribute to its high-quality renderings include global illumination and physically-based shading models, which provide advanced optical phenomena such as anisotropic blurry reflections, indirect caustics, and subsurface scattering. In addition, realistic camera models include lens distortion, motion blur, and depth of field, and physical sky and physical sun rendering provides accurate sunlight at any location as well as support for photometric lighting through the IES standard.

Added Mr. Bentley, “As exciting as all of these visualization improvements are, they are just the beginning. Our ongoing licensing arrangement with Luxology gives us access to the steady stream of enhancements from Luxology’s outstanding development team and will allow us to provide our users with ‘best of breed’ visualization – and unique integration – for years to come.”

Subscribers to Bentley’s SELECT program for MicroStation and related AEC applications will get the Luxology rendering engine at no additional charge as part of the new release this fall. For more information about MicroStation, visit www.bentley.com/MicroStation.

For more information about the Luxology technology, visit www.luxology.com.