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Although an experimental demo at this stage, with actual applications still being hammered out, the sandbox fits in perfectly with Bentley's focus on AR tools - a major theme of the company’s Year in Infrastructure conference, held in London in November. The Sandbox was devised by Frank Conforti of Bentley assisted by UC Davis Keck Centre for Active Visualisation Keck (CAVES).

OPENROADS
At a more immediate level, Bentley software users have some rather more sophisticated tools at hand than a kid's spade and a pile of sand for creating digital terrain models and populating them with buildings, roads, greenery, vehicles and people.

One of these provides a real-time tool for laying down roads, railways and bridges on satellite terrain imagery. OpenRoads allows a user to define the route of a road or railtrack by clicking at selected points on its path, allowing the software to smooth out the curves and replace the single track with a properly defined road.

Bridges, roundabouts, junctions and other road features can then be inserted complying with local standards, and culverts, drainage systems, street lighting and other furniture added at will.

OpenRoads includes OpenBridge Modeler, used to place different types of bridges from examples within a library and adjust piers, widths, gradients, generate materials, supports and reinforcements, etc. so that beams aren't overstretched, and to calculate cut and fill requirements.

If you are still working at the concept stage of a project, then you can use OpenRoads Concept Station, a tool for selling your ideas to the client. You can enhance the basic layout to make it easier to understand by creating more realistic scenes, and to ascertain its suitability for its environment. Does it fit in with its surrounds, and does it work? Will the roads handle the traffic that they expect will be using it?

The first can be discovered by populating the surrounding area with existing structures, trees and other features, the second by creating paths for vehicles and placing digital lorries scaled up to the maximum size that their design can accommodate. You can then 'drive' them on your newly created roads.

SITEOPS
Let's leave it there for a moment and look at SITEOPS; a similar real-time application for laying out specific areas within a project. Instead of defining road and rail scenarios, architects can take a parcel of land and lay out a site to include, say, a fair sized parking lot with full drainage on an undulating bit of land surrounding a building - a supermarket or school, for example. They can then link the site to adjacent roads and shield the development from the nearby motorway by a screen of trees.

A considerable amount of time and effort would normally be required to create an attractive layout, importing a contour map of the site, calculating cut and fill to produce an optimum surface area, and laying out an adequate drainage system, so that they can place an optimum number of car parking spaces. A civil engineering application would have to be brought in to design a suitable entrance and exit to the site, drainage engineers to calculate pipe flows, overflow ponds and predict maximum flooding events and cater for them, and landscaping software to drop in a line of trees and other vegetation.

The client may have already approved the building, but expressed doubts about the parking lot, requesting a number of changes. Muttering about budgets being breached and schedules being delayed, the architect would then have to go back to the drawing board and spend time recalculating all the elements with the rest of the extended team.

It’s a familiar scenario, but one quickly remedied with SITEOPS, a real-time site development tool that incorporates all of the fundamental elements of site development, and then allows your creations to be populated with plants, people, vehicles and other elements, just like OpenRoads.

It all looks deceptively simple. Following the download and display of a contoured piece of land, the area in question is described with a simple polygon. The building in question is inserted into its position as a 3D model, and the surrounding terrain modified to create a suitable parking area, calculating cut and fill requirements, which can be extracted for use with civil engineering or displayed, with a colour coded system indicating areas of both cut and fill.

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