Environments

Environments are assets that represent your physical locations - your site as a whole, or your individual buildings, for example.

This asset needs to be found somewhere under the location hierarchy.

Each environment can only display the assets found under it in the asset hierarchy. This means that if you have an environment called “Building One” that has related assets under location, you won't be able to see any of the items from “Building Two” when viewing it in ARDI-VE.

For this reason, most databases only contain a single environment which is located at the base of the Location hierarchy.

An environment can contain maps and 3D models to help give you visual references. These are used in all ARDI products to help you understand asset location.

Normally, these are based on images - either raster images (such as JPG or PNG files) or vector files (such as SVG or DXF).

For ARDI-VE, you can also use 3D models in environments, but these are not visible from clients other than ARDI-VE.

ARDI environments are made up of layers.

These layers may represent levels of a building, different heights at which equipment is placed, or may contain different types of information (such as a layer showing current status, while a different layer shows future plans).

You can switch between these layers when viewing your maps and 3D scenes.

Each layer can have a different type of media associated with it. For example, the bottom layer might have a satellite image of your location, while other layers include vector drawings of your plant, with the final layer containing a 3D model of the building.

You can read our section on maps and environments to discover how to create new ARDI environments.

There is also the Environment Construction, for advanced users who wish to create their own environments by hand.