Results of the 12d Innovation Awards 2021
For our recent 12d Innovation Awards, the judges were overwhelmed, as in previous years, by the quantity and quality of the entries, and found it exceptionally difficult to decide on the winners.
The 12d International Innovation Awards celebrates the ground-breaking work and extraordinary achievements of the global 12d Community. From clever macros to awe-inspiring projects, our users find ingenious solutions to challenging issues, and push the possibilities of technology, surveying, engineering, and construction.
The 2021 Awards involved categories for: Design, 12d Synergy, Surveying & Construction, BIM & Visualisation, ‘Banishing the Drafting Demon’ (which recognises companies that can automate their plotting and drafting processes, straight from the 3D model), Customisation, and 12d Water (which includes Drainage, Sewer, Utilities, & Rivers). We also awarded a prize for the Overall Winner, and Highly Commended prizes for Small, Medium, Large, and Government categories. Congratulations to David Healy of Orion Consulting, Hamish McRae of Lynton Surveys, Kelly Yi and Richard Traill of WSP, Seb Woodland of GHD, and Reza Zolfagharzadeh of Brisbane City Council for your Highly Commended entries!
The winner of the Design category was Peter Zimmerle of Harrison Infrastructure Group.
Peter developed a tool that takes the results produced by OS Roads to generate MTF files.
OS Road is a design tool provided by TMR Queensland which determines the Operating Speed of a proposed road. It’s a great tool, but the results are not linked to the model or drawings, and there isn’t a convenient way to display or visualise the results. The MTF files generated by Peter’s tool are used to create strings to check OS Road results.
Peter uses attributes on the OS Result strings and attribute mapping files for plan and paired cuts in long sections, to make the results of the OS Road easily and quickly accessible to the designer. This slashes the time taken to assess design options.
The winner of our 12d Synergy Award for 2021 was the team from Premise, Andrew Langdon and Glenn Brosnan.
Premise developed a full CAD workflow inside 12d Synergy. CAD templates, block attributes, xrefs, and plotting are all handled in 12d Synergy. Drawings are collaborated across 11 Aussie offices and in Vietnam.
- PDF transmittals are created using 12d Synergy Attributes and issued using Issue File Sets.
- Premise has also leveraged a Hybrid cloud set up with a cloud server and local FRS
Premise has reported a $240k annual saving as the result of improved collaboration and minimised FIFO.
The winner of the Surveying & Construction category was a joint effort – Sam Cech of Tatras Consulting and Mark Finlayson of Envivo.
Sam and Mark came up with a workflow and custom macros to turn as-built survey of underground utilities into 3D objects – both chambers and conduits.
Survey data is captured with the right attributes and pipe bearings is used to validate data from GIS. From this the entire underground system can by quickly modelled in 3d and is attribute-rich.
Tools have been written to verify the as-built data, and to ensure that the correct Quality Levels are assigned to each entity.
The as-built models are exported via IFC for upload to the Asset Owner’s database.
Such a great innovation from this team across the Tasman!
The winner of the BIM & Visualisation category was Niall Brady of Digitise Consulting!
Niall’s winning entry details how he used 12d Model to create a prototype design that achieved the digital engineering requirements set by Transport for NSW.
He used a range of tools in 12d Model in the prototype:
- Attributes were included in MTF snippets, and were added to trimesh as they were created.
- Attributes were also added to some entities using a map file to assign information based on the name of the entity.
- The Attribute Manipulator and bespoke macros were used to add attributes to the remaining entities.
- The key to his success was to set up a system for each asset type so that required attributes could be easily assigned with a minimum of user input.
The winner of our ‘Banishing the Drafting Demon’ Award was Grant Wandel of Southern Land Ltd.
Grant used the full gamut of 12d Model and 12d Synergy tools to automate design and drawing production for a residential subdivision project in Wanaka, NZ.
The Multi Page Plot used title blocks that were populated from attributes and drawing registers.
Attributes were embedded in his design snippets and then passed to plan and long section drawings. And the production of stormwater drainage drawings was fully automated.
Where possible, Chains were used to automate the reflection of design changes in the project drawing set.
Grant achieved all this while working remotely from Slovakia, and in lockdown back in NZ – thanks to 12d Synergy.
The winner of the 12d Water category was another collaboration of innovators: Patrick Cavanagh, Richard Russell, Michael Huan, and Brett Hussey, of Arcadis, Aurecon, and CPB Acciona JV (https://www.cpbcon.com.au/, & https://www.acciona.com/).
On the Western Sydney Airport project, the team faced the challenge of designing a stormwater network that was suitable for each of the three intermediate stages.
The team created workflows that allowed stormwater drainage to be designed and analysed for the final configuration of the airport and checked against the three intermediate development stages.
The innovation was in the creation of workflows that allow earthworks design options and stormwater design changes to be investigated and implications assessed very quickly. And across a site 7km x 2km with 25 million cubic meters of earthworks.
Picking the winner of our Customisation Award for 2021 was an extra tough call. The entries had equal merit, and the judges decided to share the award between two great projects, by Allan Walker and Joshua Allison, both of SMEC.
Allan developed a process used to create a federated model, where multiple designers from different disciplines share and collaborate on large datasets, using both 12d Model and 12d Synergy.
Josh has created a tool that you didn’t know you needed!
His macro takes plots of cross sections and the 3D perspective view of the road, and combines them so that cross sections can be shown in the perspective view in the right place along the road.
It’s a simple idea, with an impressive result.
The Overall Winner for 2021 was yet another great piece of teamwork – Samuel Cech of Tatras Consulting and Daniel Ripley of Acciona!
Sam and Dan developed the routine to assist in the reporting management of a large-scale earthmoving project.
Quality control of the earthworks is monitored by conformance survey and by adding attributes to the points collected. The attributes are used to generate a graphical indication of quality at each layer – rather like a borehole log in reverse. The indicators are viewed in 3D perspective to make the quality of the work quickly accessible to the entire team.
Innovation for this entry was demonstrated by coming up with the concept, and by the clever techniques used in programming so that the size of the database did not cripple 12d Model.
Furthermore, finding enough skilled 12d Surveyors for the project would have been impossible, so Sam and Dan came up with macros in 12d Model that establish a consistent GUI and workflow that Surveyors with only a basic knowledge of 12d could use to process their surveys.
Great work, Sam and Dan; that top prize was well-deserved!