📢 New! Bentley Connectors Alpha (MicroStation, OpenRoads, OpenRail & OpenBuildings)

Hi @Community - we’ve got an early Christmas present for you :gift:!

We’re excited to share an alpha release of the Speckle connectors for MicroStation, OpenRoads, OpenRail & OpenBuildings (for the CONNECT Edition of these applications). The connectors are work in progress, and currently support sending and receiving of basic geometry types (including complex chains/line strings and complex shapes) in MicroStation, OpenRoads, OpenRail & OpenBuildings and limited support for sending alignments in OpenRoads/OpenRail. Efforts to coordinate interoperability of alignments and other civil objects between Civil3D and OpenRoads/OpenRail are ongoing (ping @clrkng to learn more).

The connectors are still in early alpha, but we would love to hear any feedback you might have! We’re keen to learn what kind of workflows you imagine these connectors fitting into and keen to hear your feature requests as well. Let us know what you think here on the forums!

Documentation and tutorials for working with these connectors are forthcoming. In the mean time, you can grab the Speckle Bentley connectors from Speckle Manager and check out the source code here.

A big thank to @clrkng for coordinating this release, and thank you to the Arup team, including @daviddekoning, @tlmn, @JdB and many others, for your hard work!

Happy Holidays everyone! :christmas_tree: :star2: :snowman:

8 Likes

Hello, I’m getting an error when installing the Microstation connector - any ideas?

Hey Owen, Are you able to install any other connector from Manager?
Judging from the error, it seems like it has to do with your machine configuration (IT restrictions etc), when this happens we suggest installing connectors manually from this webpage:

https://speckle-releases.netlify.app/

Thanks, I have successfully installed it by downloading directly although I did install other connectors (Blender) through speckle manager

Hi there, any idea when the Bentley connector might be able to handle more complex geometry such as forms and smart solids please?

thanks
Lucy

Hello @lucybell , welcome to the community!

Full support for smart solids (if I understand correctly, this is Bentley’s name for breps) will depend on the development team at Arup. However, I’d be happy to look into supporting low-fidelity conversions such as sending smart solids as Meshes out of the Bentley connectors if that would help! Also, the new 2.4.0 connector release includes support for receiving Breps as meshes inside the Bentley connectors :slight_smile:

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Hi Claire, that would be great. Maybe I could send you a model to test on the above? How would it be best to contact you please? Thanks in advance

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Check your inbox for an email! Also, I’ve updated our master issue for Bentley connectors to include sending smartsolids as meshes - you can track it here: https://github.com/specklesystems/speckle-sharp/issues/1061