For decades, process screens have been flat. A tank is a rectangle, a pump is a circle with a triangle, pipes are lines. Operators learn to read these screens quickly, and for good reason: a clear 2D screen shows the state of a process at a glance. Now 3D scenes and digital twins are easy to show in a browser. That raises a fair question: should process screens go 3D?
The short answer: use both, for different jobs, built from the same symbols and the same live data.
What 2D does best
A 2D process screen is an abstraction. It removes everything that does not help the operator decide. That is its strength.
- Flow is easy to follow. Lines run left to right or top to bottom, in the order the product moves.
- States are obvious. Running, stopped, open, closed and faulted show as colour and shape.
- Values sit where they belong. A level next to its tank, a pressure next to its line.
- It scales down. A 2D screen still works on a phone during a night call.
For the control room and for daily operation, a well-drawn 2D screen is hard to beat.
What 3D adds
A 3D scene shows where things are and how they relate in space. That answers questions 2D cannot.
- Where is it? A maintenance technician looking for valve 14 needs to know which floor, which room and which side of the tank.
- What is near it? A leak or a hot spot matters more when you can see what sits next to it.
- How does the site fit together? New staff, visitors and managers understand a plant faster in 3D.
- What does it look like now? Moving vehicles, filling tanks and turning equipment are easier to follow in a scene that resembles the real thing.
What a digital twin is
The term is used loosely. A useful working definition: a digital twin is a model of a real asset or site that is linked to live data from it. A 3D picture of a building is a model. The same building with each room showing its live temperature, each air handler showing its state and each alarm placed where it happens is a twin.
A twin does not have to be photorealistic. It has to be accurate enough that people can find things in it, and connected well enough that what they see is current.
Why one library matters
Teams often build 2D screens in one tool and 3D models in another. The result is two pictures of the same plant that drift apart. The pump is renamed in one and not the other, or a new tank appears on the 2D screen but never in the model.
It works better when each symbol exists in both forms and carries the same binding to live data. Draw the process once, bind each symbol to its device, and show the result in 2D for operators and in 3D for anyone who needs to see the site in space. A change to the binding updates both.
Practical advice
Start with 2D
Build the operator screens first. They force you to get the tags, units, limits and alarms right. Everything else depends on that.
Add 3D where location matters
Buildings with many floors, large sites, tank farms and yards gain most from 3D. A compact skid on one floor may not.
Keep one style
Mixed symbol styles slow operators down. A library drawn in one hand, with the same colours for the same states, is easier to read in both views.
Do not hide alarms in the scene
In 3D, a red light behind a tank is easy to miss. Keep the alarm list beside the scene and let people jump from an alarm to its place in the twin.
How Hermetry does it
Hermetry's SCADA library is organised in industry packs, and every symbol is drawn in both 2D and 3D. Twenty of them animate while the process runs: tanks fill, pumps turn and conveyors move. Screens are built in the SCADA designer in the browser and bound to the same live values that feed dashboards, rules and alarms. Sites and buildings can be built as digital twins from the same symbols, so the 2D screen and the 3D twin always show the same data.
See the SCADA overview and the symbol library, or learn about Hermetry Twin on the Twin page.