Advanced Copy Tool in Autodesk Advance Steel

Written by Fadi Matti on . Posted in Autodesk, Construction, Engineering, Knowledge Base.

Have you ever tried copying a Beam or Plate cut feature using the Copy tool and wondered why is this not working?

Well the reason for that is Autodesk Advance Steel provides a really smart tool called Advanced Copy that allows you to copy these features. In addition, you can mirror, rotate, align, or even array features using this tool.

The following is the procedure for copying plate cut feature using the Advanced Copy tool.

  1. Create a plate cut feature, as shown in Figure 1 below:
  1. From the Advance Steel Tool Palette > Tools tab, invoke the Advanced copy tool, as shown in Figure 2.

On doing so, the Transform elements dialog box is displayed, as shown in Figure 3.

  1. In the dialog box, click the Select objects button at the top; you are returned to the drawing window and are prompted to select objects.

While creating the element contour feature, a rectangle was drawn in the middle of the plate around which the feature was created. You need to select this rectangle as the feature to copy.

  1. Zoom close to the plate around which the plate feature was created, as shown in Figure 1, and then select the rectangle that represents the cut feature.
  1. Press ENTER to return to the dialog box.
  1. Under the Distance radio button, select the tick boxes of the directions along which you want to copy the cut feature.
  1. In the edit box available on the right of the axes tick box, enter the value. In this example, I have only selected the X
  1. In the Number of copies edit box, enter the number of copies you want to create in addition to the original feature. In this example, I am creating 3 copies, which will make it a total of 4 cut features, including the original one.

Before you accept the feature, it is better to preview it to make sure all the values are correct.

  1. From the top of the dialog box, click the Preview button; the Preview dialog box is displayed near the top left of the Advance Steel window and the preview of the feature is displayed in the drawing window.
  1. Click OK in the Preview dialog box to accept the feature. The zoomed in view of the model, after creating the Advanced copy feature, is shown in Figure 4.

Author: Deepak Maini, Product Manager – BIM/MFG Solutions at Cadgroup Australia