To renew Pointools or not?

Discuss Pointools software here.
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bwiab
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Re: To renew Pointools or not?

Post by bwiab »

I know I'm a newbie here :mrgreen: and I don't mean to stir the pot, but is silence from Faraz and Dan confirmation of these rumors?

I'm new to Bentley products and have spent the past couple of days exploring pointools V8i. The animation was supercool and easy. The ability to combine modeled parts and point clouds in animations seems cool, but did not explore. Spent most of today working on classifying points to different layers. The selection process was a bit tedious, but once I understood the logic behind the selection tools the power of this was clear. However, the selection of points and subsequent movement of them to layers seemed "buggy". For example, I would select a rectangle of points in an orthographic elevation view and assign to a roof layer. Everything would look cool and then a few steps later, "roof" points would reappear on the default layer that would then have to be reselected and re-moved to the roof layer. This happened in a couple of different fashions.

Software seems to have alot of potential and as is, fairly powerful for classification. However, if Bentley is not going to support this software, no sense in taking the time to learn it or integrate it into my processes. Anyone have any updates?
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Re: To renew Pointools or not?

Post by ddustin »

Emilio,
I have to date been hesitant to be critical of Pt because I think Faraz and Dan are really good guys and wouldn't want them to construe my comments as personal attacks on them.
My thinking behind starting this thread to try to push the issue with Bentley... but alas it does not seem to have had any effect.

Bentley has continued to send me notices that my renewal was over due. Finally via email, I informed them I was not renewing and why (all the reasons stated at the beginning of the thread).

I regret recommending the software to my associates, particularly given the lack of any visible development.

Your mileage may vary as they say.
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Re: To renew Pointools or not?

Post by bwiab »

Thanks for your input David. Definitely don't mean to be attacking anyone and I apologize if it came off that way. Was reading on the Bentley website and while it didn't out right state it, it seemed to infer that the tools developed in pointools where going to be integrated into their other softwares. Don't know if that means that pointools goes away altogether or what?
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Re: To renew Pointools or not?

Post by ddustin »

No I didn't take your comments as attacking.. you were honest in your evaluations.
I was trying to dance around the issue due to liking the principles involved.
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Re: To renew Pointools or not?

Post by dan_mccurdy »

I would agree wholeheartedly with the sentiments in this thread. Pointools is a great product, which has been sadly let down by the Bentley corporate machine. The company seems to have just decided to let it die a slow death, with promises of "updates in the future" that never materialise. This limits the support that can be given for bugs, so to be honest it seems a bit pointless to report them to Bentley. Since there never seem to be any updates, the end result of a bug report seems to be that it'll be fixed at some point, but not any time soon ... so just use a workaround. I've pretty much given up my dreams of a 64 bit version any time soon, but I'd so love to be proven wrong.

That said Bentley's technical and customer support has been great since we purchased the software, especially the Bentley guys on this forum. It's just a shame that the direction for the product is clearly towards integration into other products, and not as a standalone - since I get the feeling they are hamstrung by corporate policy. It'd be great if Bentley actually came out and said categorically whether Pointools has a future, or whether it will just be part of other products.

Just like the others, my criticism isn't of the individual developers and support people (they're great to deal with), but with Bentley as a corporation. In contrast, AutoDesk manage to push out almost weekly updates to ReCap sometimes - you get the feeling that it is actively growing in the face of consumer demand, while Pointools is forced to stagnate. Seems pretty obvious at this point which horse to put money on.

So we obviously won't be continuing paying for support once ours runs out :-)
Last edited by dan_mccurdy on Fri May 16, 2014 12:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: To renew Pointools or not?

Post by dan_mccurdy »

Sorry - I should also point out that I have actually found great value in the priority support provided by Bentley in work-stopping bug scenarios. I have had situations recently where time frames were extremely tight, and Bentley came through with support to resolve the problems immediately - so the support does have some value (although there is still obviously no way around being 12 hours time different from any knowledgeable support personnel).

Just thought I should make it clear that I don't think the paid support is worthless, certainly for the first year of ownership when you are still learning your way through it's various bugs and foibles.
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Re: To renew Pointools or not?

Post by ddustin »

Actually my experience with support was less than amazing.
The issues I had seemed like greek (no offence to the Greek) to the unfortunate young lady I spoke with.

Navigating the Bentley site is "challenging" (a few more steps and I will surely start sliding down the hill from the high road).
It took quite some time to get licensing issues worked out.
I'm glad your experience has been positive.
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Re: To renew Pointools or not?

Post by dan_mccurdy »

ddustin wrote:Navigating the Bentley site is "challenging" (a few more steps and I will surely start sliding down the hill from the high road).
Yeah - the Bentley support website is an absolute joke - I gave up on that and actually had someone from Bentley just email me the documents I needed from it since I was in a desperate situation. Hand on heart - I can't think of a website less user-friendly than the support section of Bentley.com, and I've seen some shockers. I've never been forced to re-login to the same website so many times within a 5 minutes period.

I should clarify my positive experience with Bentley technical support. I dealt directly with the Bentley guys from this forum, after explaining myself several times to a person who had presumably never heard of this weird thing called "Pointools" and giving up. Dan Cutler, Felix etc.. saved me from Bentley support hell (the local NZ/Australia support folk weren't any help).

It took about a week for our license to actually activate online (only a single computer license), but the 30 day grace period took care of that thankfully, or else I would have been full of the rage that only restrictive DRM can bring on.
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Re: To renew Pointools or not?

Post by Ben fredericque »

Hi,


There are numerous aspects in this thread and I will try to put some light on some of them… I did not answer before since I was seeing it a bit pointless without a release..
1) Product Death
I have been product manager for Bentley Pointools since last fall and have no plan to kill or let the product die .

2) “Concern of lack development”

I understand that and this is true that lots of point cloud related work has been focused on other products ( MicroStation based products etc..)

This said Pointools is not dead and we keep investigating on it. We have a maintenance release of Bentley Pointools 32 bits that should come out in several days. Actually, we have a regression on some export capabilities that is delaying the release but the code is frozen and we are doing our best to ship it asap. (see the end of the post for the list of the problem addressed). If some need it before the release and knowing the regression on the export (ex: to unlock production ), let me know.

The 64 bit should come end of the summer.



3) Problems with tech support

Your are welcome to contact us directly by email if you feel that your are going nowhere with the tech support contact you have…
Felix is the preferred contact, Dan and I are alternative if Felix is not able to handle it.

[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]

4) The value of SELECT
I expect the future to include a higher frequency of releases of Bentley Pointools and would like to stress also that the priority builds that we provide in case of bug blocking production involve a significant value.. according to me.

Anyway, subscribing or not is everyone decision and even if you drop the select today and change your mind seeing the release coming later you will have the opportunity to subscribe again. (just to avoid misunderstanding, in that eventuality I believe that the SELECT cost is established by considering the contract as restarting from the date it was stopped).


Regards
Ben


Here a list of the main aspects fixed in that coming maintenance release:
======================================================
Bentley Pointools V8i Release Notes
Build 2.0140519
Version 02.00.01.04
======================================================
This release improves compatibility with ATI graphics drivers, fixes a number of bugs and adds other improvements

New:
- script support for clash tools
- script support for camera
- script support for clipbox
- added commandline options including initial script
- added near clip plane parameter to camera animation controller


Improved:
- better import of Faro fls and fws, there was an issue when selecting RGB + Intensity
- "render" right-docked menu now allows all buttons to be displayed in a 1024x768 screen
- script enhancement for file commands
- script enhancements for animation
- voxel loading process
- increased the amount of buffer space used when reading very long filenames


Fixes:
- .shp files now loading correctly. Bounding boxes were not being set when the .shp file was loaded
- position of datums in orthographic snapshots is now correct
- position of datums in orthographic snapshots can now be set using a picker tool
- added an auto open saved snapshot button
- renamed a wrongly labelled button rollover in ribbon
- new saved view when 3D model loaded caused crash
- cache folder location being stored / restored from project files
- shortcut descriptions in shortcuts window do not display in Japanese
- objects Selector window not displaying properly in Japanese
- crash on clicking on the Riegl import window
- "show all layers" resetting the current layer colour blend
- POD export stability improvements
- "invert visibility", makes sure any invert visibility points are placed onto the current layer when unhidden
- partially selected points disappearing from layers when hidden
- layer editing, unhide now working correctly for partially hidden voxels (moves hidden points onto the current layer)
- refreshing the edit stack causes the items in the stack to be reordered
- stack stability improved when items deleted from the stack
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Re: To renew Pointools or not?

Post by bwiab »

Thanks for the update Ben. I appreciate it. I've been messing around with Descartes for the past couple of days and Pointools is definitely more intuitive. Glad to hear that it is still going to be around.
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