Users

Wm Saunders Partnership LLP 

Saving time and working faster is really what it’s all about. MicroStation V8i makes it easy to move around projects and find precisely what we need. We can find the right design or sheet and get working fast with project explorer, and interact with models within drawing sheets with reference activation.

There are so many ways to find design information, including dynamic views and saved views. Things like the new right‐click menu and drag & drop abilities within MicroStation V8i make my life a lot easier.

MicroStation V8i allows us to work seamlessly with DGN or DWG file formats. We’ll likely be making more use of rendering from MicroStation in the future. We will be able to get high quality renderings from our MicroStation models now that the Luxology rendering engine is now included with MicroStation V8i. Print organizer gives us high quality plot production right out of MicroStation. If we can do it all from within one package, it’s a definite plus for us. There’s no better way of working.

Stuart Willows, Wm Saunders Partnership LLP, Newark, Nottinghamshire, UK
Wm Saunders Partnership LLP is a multi‐disciplinary practice of architects, interior designers, project managers, structural and civil engineers, quantity surveyors, building surveyors and CDM coordinators.

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Integrated Architecture 

MicroStation V8i is a landmark release. Among its many enhancements and improvements, one of the most beneficial from a production standpoint is reference activation. It saves me loads of time and helps me create more accurate drawings by allowing me to easily and instantly fix any errors on referenced models.

Another great enhancement in MicroStation V8i is the ability to customize more of its interface. The right‐click menu, introduced in MicroStation V8 XM Edition, is now more powerful with customizable context‐sensitive tools. This is revolutionary, as now we can create a list of tools that automatically populate with exactly what we need, when we need them. Using these tools along with position mapping and the PopSet tool setting display, I have more of my screen dedicated to drawing, and my tools are more easily accessible than ever before.

Matthew VanSweden, Integrated Architecture, Grand Rapids, Michigan
Integrated Architecture is a full‐service practice offering expertise in all aspects of architecture, engineering, planning and interior design.

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Kentucky Transportation Cabinet 

We’re expecting V8i to help speed plotting and publishing at the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. Support for managed workspaces is a big reason we’re eager to move to ProjectWise InterPlot V8i. With managed workspaces, whenever someone checks a file out of ProjectWise Integration Server V8i, they get the right workspace they need too. Now ProjectWise InterPlot V8i supports managed workspaces, and that will save us lots of administrative time, and we have the assurance of knowing that people are working consistently regardless of what versions they’re using. Finding our ProjectWise InterPlot Organizer files will be faster too with the integration of Project Explorer in V8i. Support of GhostScripts is another big reason we’ll move to ProjectWise InterPlot V8i. Our team will save time and the cabinet will save money now that we’ll have the ability to print Word and Excel documents direct to PDF from within ProjectWise InterPlot V8i.

Our IT department has really been pushing us to move to SharePoint for sharing information in our organization, and V8i features SharePoint integration that allows ProjectWise managed content to be displayed alongside information from other sources through a SharePoint Web portal. Kentucky doesn’t like to be left behind, and we’re motivated by all of these advantages to move to V8i.

Alex Smith, Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, Frankfort, Kentucky
The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet oversees the state’s highway and transportation system.

We have 12 districts in the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet that are located all across the state. Most of our users’ data is local, but they often have to share information with the central office. For the times we’re sharing “big files” across offices, we’re expecting a big boost in both speed and performance with V8i. With Delta File Transfer, sharing is made quicker, since only the changes need to be shared back over the network.

We work with large volumes of data in our geospatial publishing group, and I’m anticipating that V8i’s data compression will really help speed sharing and querying that data. Geo‐coordination is something that may really help us too. If there’s no coordinate system applied to a file, or perhaps there are two separate projects that we’re trying to align that have two different coordinate systems, we have to find ways to re‐project or transform that data so that they line up. V8i can help us coordinate our geospatial information from various sources in an integrated environment. There’s lots in V8i that should help us find information fast. V8i has a Quick Search tool to deliver Google‐like searches into ProjectWise‐managed information. I know that being able to search our files and projects with a simple text entry will please some of our clients in the cabinet very well. The photo preview should certainly save us time and money. Getting a quick look in ProjectWise of what photos we have of a project or some existing conditions is likely to save many of my colleagues from chasing down new ones. That’s a big gain for us from one new feature.

Jeremy Gould, geoprocessing specialist, Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, Frankfort, Kentucky
The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet oversees the state’s highway and transportation system.

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LMN Architects 

While MicroStation V8i promises many great new features, we are most excited about dynamic views. In addition to producing 2D documents that are live representations of our 3D building information models, the ability to interactively define sections through our BIM models while symbolizing the information uniquely in different areas with display styles will enable us to visualize our designs in ways that we haven’t been able to conceptualize before. Kudos to Bentley for making 3D design more interactive and more informative.

Tim Grimm, LMN Architects, Seattle, Washington
LMN Architects is a full‐service firm focusing on convention, office, mixed‐use/retail, cultural, sports, urban and interior architecture.

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HNTB 

We’re eagerly awaiting ProjectWise V8i’s release to take advantage of the new Delta File Transfer technology. Preliminary testing has shown that we can transfer big files 54x faster and transfer small files 3x faster. These dramatic improvements will allow us to make more efficient use of the network between our 60+ offices, and provide significantly faster access for our external clients and subconsultants.

Mo Harmon, vice president, HNTB, Kansas City, Missouri
HNTB is a multi‐disciplinary infrastructure firm that provides planning, design, program management and construction management services for highway, toll road, bridge, airport, rail and water projects.

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Leonardo D’Onofrio 

I’m most excited about 3D model enhancements, which will provide great agility for working with 3D models. Couple that agility with dynamic views, and MicroStation V8i users can enjoy a fully coordinated and interactive 3D model and 2D drawing environment.

Leonardo D’Onofrio, architect, Rome, Italy
Leonardo’s practice specializes in residential and commercial building design.

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REPREX 

The ability to create 3D model forms in V8i during very early design phases using basic solid entities, and then tune them using the “modify solid entity” tool, is a great step ahead. Using this and other tools in 3D is quite easy and intuitive with V8i. You can push and pull faces, divide them into smaller parts by adding new edges using the “draw on solid” tool, and manipulate edges and even individual vertices.

This way, a user can easy identify design problems from various points of view in very early stages and can adjust the model accordingly. Of course, all of these tools can be further used in a detailed model, together with Dynamic Views, to create presentation that incorporates plans, sections, elevations and more from the existing 3D model.

The important part of conceptual modeling in V8i is also the presentation of the 3D model, especially in the early stages. I use the “illustration mode” and “illustration with shadows,” and these provide very nice visual feedback to the client or co‐workers. As usual, in MicroStation V8i, the new display styles are fully customizable and allow a user to “tune” them.

I also really like the tools that manipulate mesh elements. The most important thing in the 360 design is the new Automated Coordinate System, or ACS, which allows a user to use a different ACS in different views. This is very useful, especially in non‐orthogonal models.

I would also like to point out the enhancements for working with reference files in V8i. The ability to activate a reference file, edit it, and then deactivate to get back to an active file is a great time‐saver. I use it almost daily. 

Last but not least, I like the ability to import .3dm, .skp, .obj and .3ds files.

Peter Tezga, architect, REPREX, Slovakia
REPREX offers design‐build services for industrial, commercial and office buildings.

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LPA Sacramento 

We integrated MicroStation V8i because of its abilities to work with other software formats. As an example, many of our designers use Google SketchUp throughout their design process. We were able to create photorealistic renderings and animations directly from the SketchUp files and then create 3D PDF files to share with our projects’ stakeholders.

MicroStation V8i has proven to be a valuable tool even for our AutoCAD designers. These designers use MicroStation V8i to accomplish tasks they find difficult – if not impossible – with AutoCAD. As an example, the detail sheet composition process of referencing, scaling, clipping and placing details on a sheet is very time consuming. Using MicroStation V8i, I created an application to facilitate this task. Now this process takes only a few seconds and works for both DWG and DGN files. Another difficult AutoCAD task is creating snippet drawings from the construction documents. During the project’s construction, architects use these snippet drawings to respond to RFIs, or requests for information. With MicroStation V8i, in seconds, we’re able to create partial snapshots of an AutoCAD construction document as a “letter sized” layout in the DWG document.

MicroStation V8i has allowed us to incorporate live digital information from Word, Excel, PDF, SketchUp, AutoCAD, Google Earth and various image formats into a single document. The MicroStation V8i platform gives us the advantage to utilize all our digital assets to create deliverables like never before. The integration of MicroStation V8i was quick and seamless. All of our MicroStation V8 and V8 XM
standards and customizations worked flawlessly in MicroStation V8i. This allowed our project teams to quickly benefit from MicroStation V8i’s new features.

MicroStation V8 XM Edition produced excellent realistic renderings, but one often had to master tweaking the controls to obtain the best results. The new Luxology rendering technology that is integrated into MicroStation V8i will make rendering more intuitive and the results more predictable, therefore significantly reducing the amount of time required to gain exceptional results.

Keith Macomber, director of design technology, LPA Sacramento, Sacramento, California
LPA Sacramento is a multiple discipline design firm offering services in architecture, planning, landscape architecture, interior design, and graphics.

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Washington State DOT 

Delta File Transfer is more than enough reason to go through the pain of updating our project offices to V8i. My hat is off to Bentley and everyone that made the effort to build this version of ProjectWise. By the way, all the other V8i applications aren't too shabby either!

Scott Soper, Washington State Department of Transportation

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