Bentley Systems

Bentley Systems is an infrastructure engineering software company listed on Nasdaq as BSY and based in Exton, Pennsylvania. Its reality capture line is iTwin Capture, which converts photographs and LiDAR into reality models that feed design, construction and operations work, and it sits alongside the MicroStation CAD platform and the iTwin digital twin services. Bentley also owns Cesium, whose 3D Tiles format runs through much of the company's delivery pipeline.

iTwin Capture Modeler is the desktop application. It imports and aligns photos, video and point clouds, runs aerial triangulation, applies ground control points, masks and retouching, and hands the project on for reconstruction. Bentley's own documentation lists reality meshes, gaussian splats, point clouds and orthophotos as the foundational assets it produces. Bentley brought gaussian splatting to iTwin Capture Modeler in April 2025, and added 3D Tiles and SPZ export for those splats in June 2025.

The product is tiered by where the processing happens rather than by what the desktop can open. iTwin Capture Modeler Flex is a free download covering project management for hybrid and parallel processing, image, video and point cloud import, control of aerial triangulation and reconstruction, production verification, retouching and surface constraints, and interaction with Reality Management. Paid processing runs either on premises through iTwin Capture Engine or in the cloud through iTwin Capture Cloud Services, and Bentley describes the cloud route as scaling without specialized hardware. Students and educators get access free through Bentley Education.

Splat delivery is built on formats Bentley already controls. 3D Tiles is the Cesium tileset standard, and Cesium added hierarchical level of detail for gaussian splats to 3D Tiles, CesiumJS and Cesium for Unreal in April 2026, which means a splat exported from iTwin Capture streams through a viewer stack under the same corporate roof. SPZ is Niantic's compressed splat container, and supporting both gives one export for the geospatial pipeline and one for general purpose splat tooling.

Bentley's software also hosts third party splat work. Terrasolid's TerraSplat and TerraScan run inside MicroStation rather than as standalone applications, so a MicroStation seat is the route by which classified LiDAR and gaussian splats get overlaid in the same CAD scene.

iTwin Capture Modeler Flex is available now as a free download.