Bentley Systems has announced the availability of OpenSite Designer, its integrated application for civil site and land development workflows across conceptual, preliminary, and detailed design phases.

OpenSite Designer advances building information modelling (BIM) through comprehensive 3D site design, spanning reality modelling of site conditions from drone imagery and scans, geotechnical analysis, terrain modelling, site layout and grading optimisation, stormwater drainage modelling and analysis, underground utilities modelling, detailed drawing production, and enlivened visualisations.

OpenSite Designer enables rapid and iterative conceptual design, leveraging contextual information obtained through point clouds, reality meshes, GIS, and other sources to enhance understanding of existing site conditions. Interoperating with Plaxis and SoilVision, Bentley’s geotechnical engineering solutions, site plans can be enhanced with new information about the active properties of soil including bearing capacity, stresses, and displacement.

“With OpenSite Designer, users can create intelligent 3D models containing site information, terrain data, parking lots, building pads, driveways, sidewalks, parcel layout, and related site features. During preliminary design, the site engineer can complete and subjectively improve the layout while relying on further automated optimisations, which respond to the engineering changes. To complete the project’s digital workflows, OpenSite Designer fully supports the site engineer’s detailed design including the production of all required project deliverables,” a spokesman for the company says.

For many site engineers, OpenSite Designer will advance civil site design from traditional 2D plans and profiles to a 3D modelling environment, assuring more efficient analysis of hydraulics, geotechnical, geospatial, and earthworks. Incorporating the analytics optimisation of Bentley’s Siteops technology, OpenSite Designer is the successor to the site design capabilities of Bentley’s PowerCivil, topoGraph, Geopak Site, InRoads Site, and MXSite.

Dustin Parkman, vice president, civil infrastructure design integration for Bentley Systems, says: “The collaborative nature of digital workflows converging analysis and simulation with design and modelling is exemplified in our new OpenSite Designer. We’re excited that for the first time there is a complete solution for site design and land development to accelerate site engineers going digital!”

Bentley Systems is a leading global provider of comprehensive software and digital twins services for advancing the design, construction, and operations of infrastructure.