Export Stand Alone DWGs From Advanced Steel Model (I Am Not The Drafter)??

[smullaney_shimmick_com]

Full disclosure I have never used Advance Steel and am not the drafter, I am trying to understand the workflow one might use to get what I need to see if the timeline I have been given is reasonable or if they are doing a ton of extra work for nothing. I am a general contractor and have a fabricator who originally did the model for their fabrications in Advance Steel, and from that model they apparently generated about 500 various shop drawings which were then PDF'd and given to us to submit for approval with the owner. This all took place 3-5 years ago (long project) and is before my time, but all the PDFs were long ago approved.

Part of their fab PO requires them to provide us (so we can provide the owner) with the accompanying AutoCAD files (Rev 2015, thats how long this project is). They have made a huge to-do about getting us these files despite it being a contractual requirement and we have been asking for ~10 months for them to be provided. I am now being told it is going to take weeks to get these which just does not seem right.

My understanding is within Advance Steel, any "drawings" that are made from the model that would result in your standard 11x17 shop drawings with views, details, title block, etc automatically create accompanying dwg files that live in the folder structure for that model, and are linked to the model (so they live update?) with a sidecar upd (or something like that) file. Is this correct so far? I believe I understand that as long as no one deliberately deleted those sidecar dwg files that created out 500 shop drawings, then they should still be there.

I am being told that the issue is that these dwgs cannot be given to me to open in AutoCAD (we the contractor and the owner do not have Advance Steel) because they lose all reference to the model and essentially come out blank. I understand that this could happen but I cannot imagine Advance Steel does not have a proper export function to essentially generate stand alone dwgs that contain all of the necessary detail, layers, objects, blocks, etc within each drawing file. Our fabricator is saying these all have to be done manually which is what is taking so long, is this correct? I don't have Advance Steel to play with otherwise I would do it myself, but this seems like they are either deliberately dragging their feet, fishing for more money, or not competent with the software.

Is there a way to bulk export clean, stand alone CAD (dwg) files for each drawing view generated from the AS model? I don't know enough about the program to find the right tutorial but it seems like this should be a super basic function. Am I missing something?

[Jonathan.Jasinski]

You can "explode" all the drawings in a single step from the document manager.  They do lose their connection to the model and they are not always 100% what you expect (lines over lines and the actual dimensions not matching the text).  But it is a single step to do so.  One caveat is that the exploding puts all the information on the layout tab of the .dwg.  It taking months doesn't seem accurate to me, but I don't know anything about how that project was stored on their end.

[robertwmerriman2]

Hi @smullaney_shimmick_com 

So it depends specifically what is being asked for.

Yes Advance Steel has the option to explode the drawing to AutoCAD 2015, the user could select all the drawings in the Document Manager then choose the "Add to explode" option

Then in the explode options they can choose 2013 DWG which would allow them to open in AutoCAD 2015.

Now here is the bit we don't know, what exactly is being asked for.

The way Advance Steel does it's fabrication drawings is they are in Paper space, they are also scalled down, so if on your PDF it says scale 1:10 it's a tenth of the real size 

You will also see in the PDF drawing that some of the drawings are clipped, this is where the beam could be 7m long but parts are chopped out where nothing is happening so it fits betters on the paper.

If you are asking the Advance Steel user to provide 1:1 drawings that have no clipping on them then yes this would be manual and would take a long time.

If you are ok with them being scalled down, in the paper space and have the clipping on them then it would be a 15 ISH minute job for all the drawings

[sales7NF7D]

There are lots to points there to consider, and there could be small missing contexts that would influence the answer.

1. The simple answer is yes you can export exploded 2D working drawings.

2. Plain autocad can open models and drawings with the Advance Steel Object Enabler loaded.

3. Really old models can be tricky to load if the system and databases have been significantly edited and the data was not 'Stored' in model file. There a button for this but some users don't use it automatically.

4. There is a Project Upgrade process to get old models and update databases to a new version of Advance Steel.

Good luck.  

[smullaney_shimmick_com]

Appreciate the responses, good context.

The straight answer for what is being requested is probably "not totally sure". The spec is very light on language for the CAD files, stating only that: 

"The format for the electronic files must be full-size PDF and Autocad Release 2015. "

I think in general what the owner will be reviewing for is the CAD file "matching" the PDF file they previously received as a shop drawing some number of years ago. 

Is my understanding correct that the explode/export to standalone DWG has all the lines in paper space and not in model space in the stand alone file?

If they had previously successfully generated PDFs that suited the owner, then presumably the exploded/exported dwg should match that pdf drawing, correct? Or is there a change that for one reason or another dimensions, leaders, call-outs, notes, labels, etc that were in the PDF years ago might be missing from this explode/export?

Alternatively I may be asking if they would prefer to receive the entire Advance Steel file/folder structure since it technically has more information.