GRAITEC, an international BIM and CAD software developer for AEC, and Autodesk® Platinum Partner in US and across Europe, is pleased to announce that Autodesk® Advance Steel 2017 and Autodesk® Advance Concrete 2017 are now available from Autodesk.
Autodesk® Advance Steel 2017 provides new features and enhancements to help improve productivity and usability whilst creating your fabrication documents more easily with tools to support a connected BIM workflow.
With new connections and profiles for international suppliers, more tools for cleaner documentation, options to manage Fabrication status data, and the ability to synchronise not just the structure but also the fully parametric steel connections with Revit, not to mention the ability to publish, share and collaborate with BIM360 using native Advance Steel drawing format – and whilst remaining connected to the source Advance Steel 3D model, Autodesk® Advance Steel 2017 delivers a more mature solution to create better coordinated designs and documentation.
Whilst Autodesk® Advance Concrete 2017 provides a more robust environment for completing and detailing concrete projects with links to Autodesk® Revit® for enhanced BIM centric workflow that supports an end-to-end solution.
Advance Steel is complimented with the GRAITEC PowerPack adding more functionality and further automating common repetitive tasks. PowerPack for Advance Steel can be downloaded directly from the Autodesk App Store as a free trial.
Other complementary solutions for Advance Steel available from GRAITEC include:
- Steel Structure Designer – Create, adjust and configure complete structures of all shapes and sizes in minutes.
- Ball Post Railing Designer – Adding ball post railings in Advance Steel is quick and simple with this dedicated ball post railing app.
Complimentary Reinforced Concrete design and detailing tools from GRAITEC include:
- PowerPack for Revit – over 40 new tools dedicated to reinforced concrete modelling, editing and documentation.
Carl Spalding, Product Strategy Director comments: “It is clear BIM is transforming how teams collaborate and build their projects across the globe. The Autodesk 2017 products are certainly ahead of the curve in delivering solutions to support their user’s needs for BIM centric workflows. This is evident from the harmonised structural steel workflows possible between Revit and Advance Steel dramatically reducing the initial design and rework effort for steel modelling and detailing.”
Carl continues “But this is just the tip of the iceberg. The biggest trend we are experiencing comes from the concrete sector frantically looking to replace traditional 2D detailing systems, which often break the BIM to fabrication workflow causing inevitable bottlenecks, with practical BIM-centric reinforced concrete solutions. The new reinforcement capability in Autodesk 2017 products, combined with complementary Add-ons and Apps from Graitec, demonstrate our commitment to delivering every-day reinforced concrete tools that support a BIM workflow. Looking ahead users can benefit from robust structural BIM workflows which promote the reuse of engineering BIM data, otherwise ignored when transferring project models, to enable structural projects to be completed more efficiently directly within Revit.“
On a continuous growing market in the emerging countries that invest more and more in their infrastructure, the use of tapered elements for steel structures increased, especially for portal frames having large spans. However, without dedicated tools to complete large and complex steel projects, the design process can take longer. Advance Steel 2014 provides valuable assistance to all designers with a very comprehensive set of features: a new object, “tapered beam”, which allows the user to define elements having a variable cross section, including the possibility to combine different constraints on each segment (fixed or variable lengths, parallel flanges or not, etc.).
Two of the key features of Advance Concrete (Multi File data storage and multi CAD platform) have been at the heart of version 2014. Performance and robustness have been brought in these two areas: the time to create new views and updating of existing views, has been largely optimized. More improvements in performance, which are very significant, are available: faster reinforcement elements renumbering in complex cases faster “3D Copy” feature which allows the users to copy the 3D reinforcement of an element in all corresponding views with its identification, symbols and associated dimension lines. Lastly, required corrections were made in Advance Concrete, with the target to deliver more stability and significantly higher robustness for Advance Concrete 2014.
In a context where all structural designers are increasingly receptive to the BIM concept and its associated gains in terms of productivity and safety, Advance Design 2014 provides a set of new features designed to facilitate the BIM exchange in the design offices structure or between the architects and the design offices. The model which is used for structural simulation by the engineer can be a variation of the geometrical model produced by the architect which, in the end, can be significantly different: the elements are coplanar, intersecting axes, the elements extremities which are to closed are merged, small details of the facade are not modeled, etc.
The article describes how we can create reinforcement and formwork drawings for structures with a complex geometry, namely bridge abutment using 
A reinforcement bar distributed in one view will automatically be available in all views, as long as the 3D power option is activated in the reinforcement drawing.
In order to obtain a correct reinforcement cage, the collisions between bars have to be avoided. The bar collisions can be visualized in 2D and 3D representations. They can be easily checked and corrected, at any point.
The project submitted must have been created with at least one of the GRAITEC software products: 
Civil Engineering Software Solutions 