Hi, I was wondering if there was a way to get the Australian Structural steel library installed into VA.
I would like to use the structural components in VA but currently have to resort to inserting a block from my library, as the current steel section library seems to be in US format? This method is cumbersome and tedious not to mention the objects have no parametric abilities as they are just swept profiles or extrusions. Any help would be much appreciated! Thanks,
Hi @StevenLeech,
Unfortunatelly we haven’t created all libraries for all countries, so we decided to first create the EURO and AISC libraries.
You can create you own bean and column library, using the parametric profiles that are included in VisualARQ, but you’ll have to create all predefined dimensions by hand. Then, just copy the library in the “VisualARQ/English/Libraries” folder and if will be automatically included in the new documents.
We have an internal tool to create the library from an Excel spredsheet, so if you know where we can find the dimensions for the australian structural steel library, we can try to create it for you, and of course, include it the the following versions of VisualARQ.
Thanks,
Enric
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If Steven can’t find this I’ll track one down…
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Hey thanks for letting me know. I understand why the US and EURO steel section catalogues were created first as the VA user base is probably bigger there, but yes it would definitely be handy having the library here in AUS created to so that users here can utilise the whole software and not just the Arch side. I’ll try and track down a spreadsheet of sorts and get back to you here.
Cheers,
Steve
Hi @enric @Prehabitat ,
After much scouring of the internet, I couldn’t find any excel docs with steel sections for Australia, but while looking in my CAD library, I had a look inside my setup folder and came across a whole bunch of .txt files that contained all the dimensions of each steel section (supplied by OneSteel), so I went ahead and converted them to an excel spreadsheet! Can’t believe it was that easy - had all the info all along!
I’ve attached the excel file as well as the PDF’s from OneSteel. All sizes should be there.
Please let me know how you get on. Cheers, and thanks a lot for trying to add this into VA! 
7th-ed_hotrolledcat_web-1.pdf (2.0 MB)
Austube-Mills-Product-Manual_June-2016.pdf (4.6 MB)
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Hi @enric
Can you please tell me how to upload an excel spreadsheet? I noticed it wasn’t part of the file extensions supported by the upload feature… I tried anyway, but it didn’t work.
Thanks
Hi @StevenLeech,
You can zip it and upload the .ZIP file. If it doesn’t work, send the file directly to visualarq@asuni.com.
Thanks,
Enric
Hi @StevenLeech,
We’'ll to adapt our tool to work with this Excel document. We’ll keep you informed.
Thanks,
Enric
Hi @enric
Just following up to see how you’re going with creating a Steel section library for Australia. This would be a massive help to all the users over here as we cannot use almost all of the steel part of VA’s structural tools. VA 2.0 is already out and I thought it would’ve been part of that roll-out. Would be extremely helpful to have this implemented soon. Look forward to hearing your thoughts on this soon.
Thanks,
Steve
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Hi @enric, @fsalla, while I appreciate the hard work you’ve put into an amazing plugin, it’s been over a year and I haven’t heard back regarding my question above.
I have already uploaded the documentation to create the steel library and was informed you guys already have some nifty software to create these steel connection libraries.
As I have mentioned before I cannot fully utilise the software if there is no steel library for Australia.
Can you please let me know how you are progressing with this?
Regards,
Steve
Hi Steven,
I regret to say we haven’t implemented the Australian steel library for VisualARQ beams yet.
However, from an excel file, after cleaning each sheet a little bit and saving it as csv file for each beam profile, you can load it into Grasshopper, and connect it to Beam style components in order to generate the beam styles library automatically.
I’ve sent you a video by email that explains how it works. I’ll try to make it public.
Regards,
Hi @fsalla,
Thanks very much for your help on this. I’ll hopefully get a chance to look at it over the next few days and will let you know how it goes.
Regards,
Steve
What was the conclusion of this problem.
I am trying to create UK Beam style from a .csv file. When I bake the attached definition all I get is the final size as a style. If I extract an item from the csv list and bake only that one, when I bake another item only the latest item is in the styles list.
UK Beams.csv (12.7 KB)
UK Beams.gh (12.0 KB)
Hi @David_Arthurs, try it this way:
The Beam Style component requires knowing the profile in one place, and the list of sizes in the other.
Also, the list of sizes needs to be flattened in order that they are all baked for the same style.
Attached modified gh file:
UK Beams 2.gh (15.7 KB)
After baking the Beam style component:
By the way, we are going to include the structural UK steel profiles library for beams and columns in VisualARQ 3. But you can already import them with this .val file:
UK.val (282.4 KB)
Use the vaStylesImport command to import them.