S7 PLC and 3D visualization

Hello guys,

My company has been dealing with small hydro power plants. During FAT(factory acceptance test) we are showing our customers our product together with Simulator of power plant. Simulator si just mathematical model of the power plant and it is made inside S7 PLC. Of cource Simulator gots its own SCADA in WinCC or WinCC Flex, but what I want now is to expand it to 3D. By watching recently videos on YT, I have seen it is possible to link some 3D softwares with Siemens PLC. What's your experience guys regarding this topic? Which 3D softwares you find the most suitable?

Is this something that will give you any benefit?

I've made some tests with this using only free software, and I've also uploaded some videos to YT.

In practice I'd say this is most useful in plants where you have conveyor and/or warehouse systems. There you can test many cases like sensor failures, traffic jam handling and so on, as you can run through the plant and modify something, place boxes in front of sensors etc. In the process industry where you have to control temperatures, flow rates, pressures and so on, it's almost useless. You can do the same on a command-line simulation without a GUI and use the standard Scada/Hmi to see what's going on.

For 3D Simulations I've made running examples using the Blender Game Engine (BGE) and the Unreal Game Engine (UDK) connecting to S7-Plcsim and optional Beckhoff Ads communication.

The Blender Game Engine has the advantage, that it's open source, you can use Python as script language and you have a full 3D Editor included.
In most other game engines you need a separate 3D modeling software like Maya, 3ds max, or even Blender to create your models you can later use in your game engine.

The version of the Unreal Development Kit is no longer supported. But with the tests I made, it has really fantastic graphics and much better physics simulation than the Blender Game Engine, escpecially when your scenes have many dynamic objects.