The results prove them right: companies investing in digitalisation have pulled ahead of the rest

The Autodesk professional forum organised by HungaroCAD Kft. was held on 14 June at Etele mall in Budapest.

The event provided an insight into the technological innovations from design software vendor Autodesk that will shape or already dominate the future of design and manufacturing.

After the plenary presentations, the conference, which had messages for both the construction and mechanical engineering industries, was divided into two sessions (construction & IT, mechanical engineering) - we report on the former, based on the summary received from BuildEXT Kft.

The digitalisation of Hungarian municipalities and companies is also very low

The event was opened by Balázs Sabathiel (HungaroCAD and Arkance Systems Hu, CEO). His presentation focused on the importance of digitalisation in the construction industry, with interesting and visual diagrams from the European Investment Bank's Digitalisation in Europe 2022-2023 survey.

The study showed, among other things, that Covid-19 here and there, inefficient operations there, construction companies have continued to invest the least amount of energy in digitisation in recent years. Hungary is also a laggard in this respect: another figure showed that, as in Romania, the digitisation of municipalities in Hungary is extremely low and the proportion of digitised companies is also far behind that of all European countries.

How digital firms have pulled away, the gap is widening

Patrik Minks, regional sales manager for Autodesk, added to the above, presenting the State of Design and Make survey conducted by Autodesk over the past few months. Amongst many other findings, it was clear from this that companies which had placed greater emphasis on digitalisation had performed better over the past three years – and that this performance gap is set to widen further in the future.

As a result, it led to the expansion/transformation of services, which will be the Autodesk Design and Make platform, which in our case means that they will start building digitised processes from the beginning of the construction value chain and then plan to extend this to all elements of the life cycle.

As a first step, the FormIt application has been migrated to Construction Cloud and the project planning phase, concept design and budget estimation process are combined with site analysis. It's called Form and is now available in the AEC collection.

A refreshing example from Kecskemét

After the Autodesk, Béla Szivák, Head of Digital Development at Paulinyi & Partners, presented an application developed in-house using PowerBI and Autodesk Construction Cloud, which analysed the cost estimation and return on investment of real estate developments.

The Abrazív Kft., a technology design company based in Kecskemét, Hungary, designs feed mixing plants. It was refreshing to hear a presentation by György Misits, chief designer - the company, which has been going through every step of 3D and BIM technology alone since 1999, uses almost all BIM technologies available today (model building, branch coordination, production support, crash testing, scan2BIM, drone), and is currently experimenting with AR technology.

Interesting development directions for Revit

Next, Péte Kaiser, founder of 3dhome, presented the Autodesk visual design toolkit, highlighting in particular the Twinmotion processes and their associated training. Not to be neglected is the information that the current visualization content libraries that exist on multiple platforms will be merged into a single marketplace.

The two BIM managers of KÉSZ Metaltech, Ildikó Trick and Gábor György presented a case study of their design-build-site process built on Autodesk Construction Cloud and Assemble tools.

Gábor Schnierer, civil engineer and Revit application developer presented the capabilities of Revit in the field of reinforced concrete structures. The progress is visible (he started with the 2008 version in the presentation), with continuous improvement a "Hungarian-style" reinforcement plan and list can be slowly created. The development(s) of the next years can be expected e.g. in the analysis engine(s) of Revit, which certainly sounds interesting.

BIM-based item budgeting and model-based construction tracking

Dávid Lovász, manager of BuildEXT BIM presented the CRE Awards winning ACADEMIA office building project. In a case study titled "The Power of the Living BIM Model", he demonstrated how the BIM model created as part of a project that included lobby renovations, mechanical upgrades and bodyfit design can be used to design future tenant fitouts. He also explained the role of BIM-based item budgeting and model-based construction tracking, demonstrating step-by-step the workflow based on Revit.

David Kathy, Colas Hungária Specialist (BIM chief engineer) presented a roadmap of the software and applications used in the COLAS infrastructure department. Road and bridge construction has a very specific set of tools, but you can see that they have a lot of the 3D and BIM tools.

Navigate on a map to access uploaded plans for a particular area

The last two presentations were given by colleagues from Arkance Systems HU. Róbert Csevernák spoke about TwiGIS, a well visualized, layered data, design and model repository. Navigating on a map, we can access the uploaded plans and models (in IFC format) of a given area (plot). The system is also operational, available on PC and mobile devices.

The last presentation was given by Mark Pálinkás, who talked about the methods to get into the data content of a file and extract additional useful information and data for further operations. In this way, they are able to perform tasks where the existing design file cannot immediately provide relevant answers to the questions that arise, but information can still be extracted from the inner parts, making the task feasible.

The detailed programme can be viewed on the HungaroCAD website, with more photos available on the company's Facebook post.