I spent some time with Don Murray of Safe Software at the GITA event. He toured me through their impressive new server technology that will be coming out in early April, and we also talked a bit about cracking 3D translations between CAD/GIS/BIM.
Don discussed the issue of Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) as a way of representing solids, and indicated that this approach proved necessary for 3D conversions. Early work that they did to develop their 3D translation tools turned out to leave some data behind and limit spatial analysis. When they dug into this they discovered that CSG was the route to go for calculations such as the intersection, union and subtraction of solid objects.
I don’t yet fully grasp all the implications or nuances of this modeling approach, but there are some great resources online that describe the issues (here and here). Of course the CAD and BIM programming communities have been well aware of these issues for some time, and GIS is now gaining a grasp thanks to the advancements Safe Software brings to the table and the new and exciting 3D data storage capabilities that Oracle has recently added.
I look forward to seeing how users apply these new capabilities to create intelligent models.
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