Customer Requested Enhancements Help Structural Engineers and Detailers with Faster Detailing and Documentation

Today at the NASCC: The Steel Conference in Nashville Autodesk previewed Autodesk Advance Steel 2016, which includes the top-most requested enhancements from Advance Steel users worldwide. Advance Steel 2016 preview activities at the Conference include a special workshop being staged today; and demonstrations throughout the week at Booth 820.  In addition, in keeping with the conference’s music theme, booth visitors can see a fun “Advance Steel” guitar model in action [shown below], receive a souvenir guitar pick, and enter a random drawing to win a Gretsch G9200 Boxcar Round-Neck Resonator steel guitar.

Slated to release next month, Autodesk Advance Steel 2016 software provides structural steel detailers, fabricators and engineers, with easy-to-use, yet comprehensive tools based on the familiar AutoCAD platform.  These powerful 3D modeling tools support a Building Information Modeling (BIM) process to help accelerate more accurate detailing of structural elements, steel connections, and plates.

In addition, Advance Steel 2016 helps speed time to fabrication by automatically generating shop and general arrangement drawings, creating bills of materials, and producing CNC files directly from designs.  With interoperability between Autodesk Revit 2015 and Autodesk Navisworks 2015 software products [and the upcoming 2016 releases of each], as well as other BIM software, Advance Steel 2016 also provides a way to connect BIM-based design and construction through fabrication.

"Following the introduction of Autodesk Advance Steel 2014 we received a lot of great feedback and suggestions from users worldwide.  The new 2016 release incorporates the top most requested enhancements resulting in performance, weld definition and interoperability improvements, to name just a few," says Heiko Graf, Autodesk Sr. Product Line Manager.

Key customer-driven enhancements for Advance Steel 2016 include:

• Steel Modeling: Scalability & Performance Improvements – Helps to navigate more efficiently in a model by quickly isolating selected elements in a work area to be displayed in the current visual style, while the other elements get a much lower LOD (beams axis shown only).  This enhanced feature helps improves performance when working with complex models.

  Enhancement helps improve performance when working with complex models.

• Steel Modeling: Weld definition properties enhanced – Representing specific weld characteristics in a DWG file used for fabrication can be a time-consuming, tedious task.  Enhancements now help users to define weld properties directly [e.g. effective throat or root opening], or opt to have them set automatically when using the automatic steel connections feature. The resulting ISO standards-compliant weld symbols are displayed automatically on drawings; and specific preferences may then be easily adjusted in the DWG file. 

 
Specify weld properties in the model and get them being displayed more accurately on drawings.

• Interoperability: Status tracking information - Helps to easily round-trip model information with MIS software thanks to a bidirectional link. This enables the updating of a model with the current status information from fabrication to shipping. Elements can then be colorized in the 3D model based on these updated status. These features help facilitate an integrated steel fabrication management process.

 
Update a model with the current status information from fabrication to shipping.

“One of the areas where we are very excited about Advance Steel is to be able to address some of these crucial issues for owners in a common environment where they can communicate together. The models for the exterior skin can be interacted and communicated with for the structural steel.”  Will Ikerd, IKERD Consulting.

"What we like most about Advance Steel is that it directly talks to Revit.  And so there's no mis-translation when the files go between Revit and Advance Steel, as might happen with other packages.  The other thing we like about it is that it's very intuitive piece of software.  So, the time to come up to speed is very short." David Blieman, Rutherford + Chekene.

Availability  

Autodesk Advance Steel 2016 today is expected to be available next month in the following languages:  English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, Czech, Polish, Romanian, and Portuguese (Brazilian); and licenses may be purchased through Autodesk’s authorized resellers for the product.  Subscription options include Maintenance Subscription and Desktop Subscription. For complete purchase and pricing information, as well as customer case stories, see the Autodesk Advance Steel 2016 page at http://www.autodesk.com/products/advance-steel/overview.