Special Shapes
By using the special shape management of ProSteel, you can add your own custom shapes to the program which will then be processed like pre-defined standard shapes.
These special shapes can be saved in any number of catalogues containing any number of shapes, i. e., you can establish same sorting as with standard shapes. The selection menu then shows catalogue names as a shape type and the shapes contained in each catalogue appear as shape size, making it easy to choose between different system shapes.
You can create special shapes as combination of existing shapes or by using a drawn cross-section or a variant (qualitative generation instruction) with corresponding data base.
Create and Manage Special Shapes
The program once again manages these shape catalogues in four special shape master groups, which all basically have the same properties and are consequently described together in this chapter.
There is a distinction between general special shapes, roof-wall shapes, combination shapes and weld shapes.
You create the first two groups by drawing a cross-section; for combination shapes you combine existing shapes to create a new shape (e.g. two U-shapes welded together). The weld shapes are created using a special dialog.
These are two examples of possible special shapes. The left shape was drawn as a cross-section and then stored as a special shape, the right one is a combination of two U-shapes.
In addition, you can store each shape in three different display modes (low, normal and high – which must be created individually). You thereby avoid having to deal with a confusing number of lines when working with rather complex shapes like in the left example, but you can show the complete shape if needed.
Nonetheless, you can always select the ProSteel standard display modes (only center line, envelope, etc.) without having to change any parameters.
Here, you see the dialog for special shape management. It is organized in a tree structure and consists of 4 main directory nodes for the different types of special shapes.
Each of these branches can contain subordinate directories and each subordinate directory can have any number of special shape definitions. However, you cannot make any further subordinate division. Select a shape and the stored cross-section will be previewed on the right pane.