FIATECH webinars

As I promised here the link for the webinar below. It was good to listen to it, although it didn't report me many new ideas. In the other hand it confirmed a few ideas I had like the need of OpenGL to have real time 3D or that the integration of 3D viewers with other application is a must to obtain the maximun from the 3D application, otherwise it could just become a nice to have tool.

In addition I would like to comment the next years exibition that Fiatech is doing (See the screenshot).

Digital Assets: Real Time Environments for Real Time Projects
FIATECH Webminars

Digital Assets: Real Time Environments for Real Time Projects

There is a nice webminar that will take part today. I'll do a few comment after it.
You can still reserve a sit if you wish:
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/957875529

3D terrains

In the last weeks I’ve hearing the idea of including big high resolution terrain textures within the 3D models in a 3D visualization Software, to allow the end user have a realistic idea of the environment where the 3D model is located. There are many ways, as always, to do this but all of them are at the expenses of others.

From one side there is the Google earth method, which uses different textures to visualize the different areas that are in view. As the end user zooms in, a bigger resolution image for the specific area is loaded. I’m not an expert but I’m quite sure that this is not very difficult to do, although it’s probably quite laborious and expensive as many textures are required from the satellite. In addition every time the terrain changes the work needs to be done.

In the other hand, there is another way that is probably much more difficult to develop, which is based in the idea of streaming the texture area that is needed. This technique is much cheaper when getting the texture (only one is needed and no extra work), although it’s probably more expensive to develop. Of course, once developed, this can be used for any texture.

Another technique that is being used in the 3D visualization is to reduce the texture resolution until it’s the one supported by the graphics card during the export to the specific format. The problem here is that the graphic cards vary from one Computer to another and, although the minimum acceptable nowadays is 2K*2K, there already many graphics cards supporting better resolutions. Of course the vendors need to take these limits into account and have to take a difficult decision; go for the save option and only allow 2K*2K textures or allow the user to use the maximum of his graphics card? Of course the second option seems to be the good one but (there is always a but) if this user the gives the 3D model to another one with a lower specs graphics card it will make it not to work properly.

I’m sure that there are many other nice ways to fix this problem but this are the ones I have faced myself.

Below some numbers:

A. 16K*16K resolution texture (very very high resolution) --> Expensive and great for huge terrains
B. 8K*8K resolution texture (very high resolution à 4 times less than A)
C. 4K*4K resolution texture (high resolution à 16 times less than A)
D. 2K*2K resolution texture (high resolution à 64 times less than A) --> Very cheap and bad for big terrains

Some thought about the 3D training

There are many different reasons that make training very important when it comes to the Oil & Gas industry.

One of the main problems that these big companies, as well as Nuclear or Chemical big companies, are facing is the impossibility to do the training in a real environment, as it could cost a lot of money. Although there is no way that a new operator, it doesn’t really matter the area he/she will work on; will be allowed to start working in the real facility without a previous training.

Up to now it was almost impossible to have a real 3D model of the Plant because, as I have mentioned in previous posts, there was no way to have complete 3D plant rendered on a PC, with enough performance to have a realistic environment. Therefore 2D or faked 3D worlds were used, losing the big advantage of working in a real model.

Again, thanks to the new technologies applied to the 3D and a bunch of incredible developers that love graphics, this is starting to become a reality.
There are already a few applications that are starting to integrate with each other in order to have a realistic environment that could cover from a simple Operator routine, where the trainee would have to go around the plant to learn the path he would need to go through in the real environment; to a real shut down where many alarms would need to be controlled and understand in order to proceed in the correct way. These applications are called with different name like OTS (Operational Training System), ITS (Inmersive Training System)...

In addition to the standard 3D training , that is already very useful, were many operators could get trained together, promoting communication and team work, there is also the possibility to have all these in an immersive environment, so the operator really “feels” that he’s walking inside the plant.
I think this is very interesting topic that I’ll keep writing about as there are many things that I keep learning every day.

Managing Operational, Safety and Compliance Risk with Effective Asset Information Management (AIM)

I've found this video quite interesting if you are interested in the integration of different sites or units of a big company. They explain a bit what they are working on at the moment and how they would like to achieve the project.

They put a big emphasis on the concept of keeping always all the information updated and link different sites information so that information can become very useful to everyone.

This is the same idea of the last post I did related to the 3D models and the importance of keeping them updated so everyone access the latest version of the model, to avoid making wrong decision that may cost a lot of money.

http://fiatech.org/webinar-archives/369-september-15.html

GIS and 3D SW

Usually, or better said, always, big companies have more than one site that they need to have under control. These sites, of course, are not collocated around the same area and but still it’s useful if there is a way of visualizing all of them in one go using a map. Nowadays these maps, similar to the ones of Google earth or other companies like ESRI, are available to be used. The cool thing about these maps is that information can be added to them generating an intelligent map or GIS map. When this GIS maps are integrated with a 3D visualization SW we can get the full system dreamed by any operator. On one side they can check if there are any alarms on any the sites that need to be controlled in a very big area. On the other, when there is an alarm it’s very easy and intuitive to navigate into the model to check the exact equipment that is producing the alarm.
As said when these systems are integrated together, operators will resolve one of the big challenges that have nowadays; capability to review all the sites that are many km away from each other and the capability to immerse into one specific site to inspect a detected alarm, and all this on just one click, or even less.

Laser Scan and 3D modeling

As the 3D is getting more important in some of the big Oil&Gas compnies, the need to get realistic 3D models is becoming a pain to most of the managers. The main problem comes when the plant to virtually visualize is very old, may be from the 60s or 70s of last century, when of course there was no 3D modeling at all like there is nowadays, in most of the companies. To face this problem some companies offer scanning services that can do very interesting work. Of course, scanning the whole plant and viewing it as a pointcloud, is not enough for most of these big companies as the final idea is far more ambitious than just visualizing it. As I have commented in previous posts, the final idea is always integration with other SWs and DBs. In order to do this, these scanning companies are also evolving to include in their services what is being called “modeler”, to allow the end user to obtain the 3D data as polygons instead of 3D points. These modeling tools are just semiautomatic and require quite some time to model a whole plant, although they are becoming a real need to get valid 3D data that can be really integrated.

I leave a nice post about laser scanning of one of my colleagues:

http://engineervr.blogspot.com/2009/06/laser-scan-side-note.html