Bentley Geopak, first impression

Similar (not much) to what AutoDesk Civil 3D offers, Geopak is a series of Bentley applications for Civil Engineering for making works for surveying, digital terrain models, design of roads and some geotechnical tasks. Although we know, the latter will be catapulted after the acquisition of gINT Software.

RunningGeopak

Once installed, it is not created a particular icon for Geopak, it activates automatically when Microstation runs. In case this doesn’t happen, activate it manually by choosing Applications > Bentley Civil > Activate Bentley Civil

What does Geopak includes

At a generic level, as Bentley Civil includes several features, Power Civil is a variant with lower tools and some adaptations for the Hispanic environment like Power Civil for Spain.

Bentley Civil features are:

Drainage
Landscape
Road
Site
Survey
Water sewer

Although this scrambled mix (Spanish idiom: “sancocho”, stew, a particular mix of objects without any order) of tools has been increased with the task navigation which it is listed at task- level as follows:

Cadd Tools
Survey
Geomtry
DTM Tools
Site
Drainage
Water Sewer
Plans Preps & Quantities
Landscape
Geotechnical

This is a better way to operate, because although some are repeated, it’s more easy to use because they are grouped based on common applications such as:

Survey: Include tasks for importing data from topographic equipment / gps, edit them, make differential corrections, export to another formats, send back them to field, etc.

Site: Includes volume’s management, platforms preparation, cuts, urban and road design, etc.

DTM Tools: This remains at a generically level for digital models building, contours level, profiles, etc. Although the necessary tools for Site and Survey are shared there, like the creation of pending maps, import or export functions, etc.

Preliminary Conclusion

In terms of functionality, this World is very different from Civil3D, which it seems to me more practical because it is divided between objects and settings, while Geopak remains at level of tasks, projects and templates. Like Microstation with AutoCAD, Bentley Civil take a few days for resetting mortal’s logic, but it has maintained consistent, if we compare Bentley Site V8i with SiteWorks 95.

In terms of computer performance: my respects. The process of 230,000 lines of the dwg archive from IGN which was sent from my Guatemalan friend the other day, in Civil3D makes the computer crash after four minutes, uttering a blasphemous message insufficient memory. In Geopack it stayed 42 minutes, while the slash (Spanish Idiom: “pleca”, whose symbol is “/”) was continuously turning and indicating how many objects had, but finally were entered as breaklines in a gsf and converted to TIN in 2 minutes. The CPU reached until a 49% and in the meantime, PC’s memory continues in a regular way for doing other tasks.