The City of Helsinki leverages Bentley's reality modeling software to create 3D city model Sponsored

The City of Helsinki launched a EUR 1 million project to produce a 3D representation of the city to improve Helsinki’s internal services and processes, promote smart city development, and share city models as open data to citizens and companies for research and development.

The City of Helsinki launched a EUR 1 million project to produce a 3D representation of the city to improve Helsinki’s internal services and processes, promote smart city development, and share city models as open data to citizens and companies for research and development. As part of this three-year Helsinki 3D+ initiative, the project team will deliver a pilot portfolio to demonstrate the power of new modeling technology and promote its use in higher education.

They used a combination of laser scanning and oblique photogrammetry to acquire data and images for the project. Leveraging ContextCapture and a host of Bentley 3D reality modeling applications, the team modeled the surface and terrain and generated a reality mesh model of the entire city. ProjectWise served as the collaborative interface to manage all information and share data across internal and external teams.

Outcome

The use of Bentley software significantly lowered the cost of making the reality mesh model of the city and the semantic city information model. Bentley’s interoperable modeling applications provided the City of Helsinki the ability to implement smart city development, advanced city analyses, and the opportunity to participate in frontline progress. Using ProjectWise accelerated information mobility and kept the three-year project on track. Upon completion, the project is expected to promote the use of new technology and change work methods at universities, companies, and within city departments.

Software

The City of Helsinki used Bentley’s reality capture technology for geo-coordination, optioneering, modeling, and visualization throughout the Helsinki 3D+ project. For large scale base maps and utility maps, the team used Bentley Map. They relied on Descartes to process oblique and orthophotos, Bentley Pointools to model the surface and terrain, ContextCapture to create the 3D mesh representation of the city, and LumenRT for visualization to present the models. Using ProjectWise as the common environment for all project data optimized document management and streamlined workflow among internal and external teams. 

Read more about the project here.