As project requirements get more complex and the time to complete projects gets shorter, it can be difficult to deliver your drawings and CAD models on time. Shrinking budgets, compressed delivery schedules, and ever-increasing project scales and complexity mean that you should expect more from your design software. Manual CAD workflows and flat productivity are jeopardizing your competitiveness and, potentially, your reputation. You shouldn’t have to work harder and longer to deliver great projects—your computer-aided design software should work harder for you.

Whether you need more productive 2D drawing software or better applications for 3D CAD design, speeding up drafting and modeling doesn’t have to be a massive undertaking. Instead, regain your competitive edge by gaining the flexibility and power of BIM workflows without abandoning your familiar 2D drafting and CAD design skills. Save time and money by eliminating tedious, repetitive drawing workflows and, instead, collaborate reliably with any project participant, regardless of what CAD file formats or CAD applications they use.

What is MicroStation?
MicroStation is the world’s leading 3D computer-aided design and visualization software for the architecture, engineering, construction, and operation of all infrastructure types.

Who can use MicroStation?
Architects, engineers, design professionals, and draftsmen can use MicroStation. From individual professionals to multinational design firms, leading project teams rely on MicroStation to confidently deliver projects, no matter the scale and complexity.

What benefits does MicroStation offer?
MicroStation is a comprehensive solution. As 3D CAD software that is used by leading design firms, contractors, and owner-operators around the world, it provides a range of capabilities: CAD drawing and design, 3D modeling, visualization, component management and mark up, and collaboration across disciplines. Users can do everything that they need without flipping back and forth through many different applications. While you don’t need to use the cloud services available within MicroStation, you can use them if you want to advance your productivity and competitiveness.

Capabilities
– Create project deliverables
Generate consistent, high-quality deliverables such as paper plots, reports, 2D/3D PDFs, i-models, and 3D physical models. Create annotation, display styles, and reports directly from the embedded properties of objects to ensure that they will always remain in sync with the design model during work-in-progress.

– Design in context
Clearly understand existing conditions and accelerate design modeling workflows with the ability to easily integrate imagery, point clouds, and 3D reality meshes into design and construction models. Integrate geospatial information to ensure that models are precisely geospatially located.

– Design with true 3D parametric modeling
Develop even the most complex design models with a wide range of design modeling tools, including surface, mesh, feature, and solid modeling. Build parametric functional components with predefined variations to easily find and manage many similar components. Use drawing extraction tools which automatically immerse drawings within models for improved clarity and streamlined documentation workflows.

– Enforce standards
Ensure the proper application of organizational and project-specific standards and content. Apply templates to control geometry and data standards such as styles for dimensions, text, lines, detail symbols, and more. Once designs are complete, use automated tools to check drawings for standards compliance. Discover how you can manage design changes and drawing standards, and control and protect files.

– Lay out and annotate drawings
Create precise drawings using a comprehensive set of drafting tools to rapidly progress your designs from concept to completion. Use persistent constraints to maintain your design intent and speed drafting and annotation workflows with intelligent, interactive snapping and dynamic data entry.

– Produce animations and renderings
Secure stakeholder buy-in by producing realistic movies and simulations from design, construction, and operational models. Choose from keyframe and time-based animation. Get the results you want, faster, using live on-screen animation previews and distributed network processing. Create lifelike visualizations and access online and deliver libraries of physically correct materials, lighting, and rich photorealistic content.

– Visualize and analyze designs
Understand designs more clearly by analyzing and performing data visualizations on models based on their geometry or underlying attributes. Perform analysis of real-world solar exposure and shading. Apply real-time display styles to visualize models based on each object’s height, slope, aspect angle, and other embedded properties. Visualize reality meshes based on associated spatial and attribute data.

– Work collaboratively on designs
View and work with design information from others in real time using live referencing of 2D and 3D DGN, DWG, and large image files, refreshed on demand. Create and exchange digital markups of designs. Track and easily understand changes made to design files, even at the component-level, throughout their lifecycle. Improve enterprise-wide collaboration through integration with ProjectWise.

– Work in a personalized environment
Confidently work in the right context for each project with the required settings and standards automatically applied. Instantly get help and achieve mastery with access to a comprehensive library of learning content. Streamline your workflow and integrate with enterprise systems using a wide range of available tools to customize the user interface including Microsoft (VBA), .NET, C++, C# and user-defined macros. Personalize and group tools and tasks and reduce keystrokes with customizable menus.

The latest generation of MicroStation-based platform products are called the Connect Edition, taking over from the previous generation V8i. Bentley has dabbled with Microsoft naming conventions (95) to straight versioning over the years, this represents a break from all previous branding.

MicroStation’s advanced parametric 3D modeling capabilities allow infrastructure professionals of any discipline to deliver data-driven, BIM-ready models. Your team can aggregate their work on MicroStation, including designs and models created with Bentley’s discipline specific BIM applications. As a result, you can create comprehensive, multi-discipline BIM models, documentation, and other deliverables. Since your project team will work in a universal modeling application, they can communicate easily to share intelligent deliverables and maintain the full integrity of your data.

MicroStation and all Bentley BIM applications are built on the same comprehensive modeling platform. You therefore can easily progress your MicroStation work into discipline specific workflows with Bentley’s design and analytical modeling BIM applications. With this flexibility, each member of your project team has exactly the right application for the work they need to do.