A Guide To Advance Steel Cladding

There is a handy set of tools in Advance Steel for placing cladding sheets in your model. Although the commands are named as cladding these can in fact place any sequence of corrugated sheeting including decking. However, the prompts are a bit confusing and many users fail to get the expected results. In this post I will explain the key points of how to use these tools.

Depending on your requirements cladding is created in three steps represented by the column of three icons on the ribbon. Firstly, you define the area to clad, then you define any openings in that area and finally you create the actual cladding.

Although this is not required when making a simple rectangular area, I personally prefer to first draw the areas I require using polylines. The image below shows my starting point:

I can now create my cladding using the following steps:

Define Cladding Area

The first question is whether you want to select supporting beams. If you say no the sheets can be of infinite length, but if you do select supporting beams the sheets will be cut and overlapped lengthwise at each supporting beam. I will say yes and select the beam.

After doing that, you are asked if you want your area to be a rectangle or from a polyline, so in this case I will say from polyline and pick the yellow outline.

Finally, you will be asked if you want to delete the source object – always say YES. You already have a new cladding area object in its place.

That has defined the area you want to fill with cladding but has not actually created any cladding.

Define Cladding Opening

Now we get a chance to put any openings into the area we have defined.

Select Define Cladding Opening. Again we will be asked if you want a rectangle or from polyline, and we will select “from polyline”.

BEFORE you can actually select the openings, you must choose the area that the openings go into, so we must pick the outline now, NOT the magenta opening.

Now you select the polylines for your openings, and you can select more than one if you need to.

You should again say yes to delete object since you now have new cladding opening objects on top of the original polylines.

You won’t see any change in the model but the polylines will be replaced with new objects.

Create Cladding

The third step is to actually make the cladding sheets using the Create Cladding command.

To do this, first select the outline defined with the Define Cladding Area command above.

Your cladding area will be covered in sheets with the opening cut out. You can select from many different types of sheet including decking and insulated panels on the Section Properties page. There are several FAQs at the Autodesk website to help you create new sheet profiles if you need them. This is done via user sections and database entries.

In the first instance the cladding sheets will create a rectangular area regardless of the shape of your polyline. To get the sheets trimmed to follow your shape exactly you should select the “Upper / Right level and offset” page and set “Upper/ right level” to “level according to slope” and “upper right cut according to slope” to “cut along slope”. You can then repeat these settings for Lower/left.

As you can see in these last two images the sheets overlap and interlock on the width according to the profile shape. If a supporting beam is selected the sheets are also cut and overlapping on the length.

These tools are usually adequate for most situations, and as always you can obtain drawings of each unique sheet if desired.

If you are looking for additional functionality for your steel workflows, the Graitec PowerPack for Advance Steel contains plenty of powerful features. If you have any enquiries, please send us your message now.