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