Bentley ProSteel for AutoCAD

Does anyone here use this? What are your experiences with this software?

Search for prosteel it has been mentioned a number of times go bottom of search use any date.

I have been using ProSteel for about 2 years.

What sort of work are you interested in doing?

Lamensterms is another current forum member who has been using it for 6 or 7 years.

We use it for our projects now. There are still some things we choose to do using plain Autocad.

Watching it churn out fabrication drawings is pretty amazing, because it spits out hundreds of drawings in a few minutes.

Whereas I used to draw them, with a coworker, now I pretty much just check them.

Really speeds up the delivery of workable drawings to our suppliers in China, and reduces the likelihood of human induced errors.

There is an Autocad version of this, called Advanced Steel, which might be more intuitive for someone coming from an Autodesk mindset.

It does all the same stuff, but the logic is more like Autocad.

Check it out, download a free 30 day trial and take it around the block to see what it can do.

3D Modeling certainly goes a lot more quickly, and assemblies contain BOMs.

Some of the ways in which things are approached in Bentley think (having been weaned on Autocad), seem quite convoluted and counter-intuitive.

So here is the situation. My company has an engineering office in the US and in Germany. All of our detailers in Germany use ProSteel, our US does not. I'm in the US. One person in the US knows it fairly well and I only use it to drop in Beams or custom extrusions. I was asked to learn ProSteel more in-depth and help our US office to transition to it.

I agree that ProSteel can seem counter-intuitive and convoluted. This is why I steered clear of it except for Beams. However, I'm told the capabilities aside from 3D are pretty awesome. Namely creating your piece drawings and generating BoM.

My concern with ProSteel is that Bentley doesn't really seem to support it very well. I was looking for the current version of ProSteel and you would think that would be an easy task, but I can't find it. I went to the Bentley site and they don't list the version only that it exists. I found a forum post that the more current version of ProSteel runs on ACAD 2016. So Bentley is already 2 years behind ACAD. I've also read that Bentley wants to abandon ACAD support and push their stand-alone version of ProSteel.

What version of ACAD are you guys using with ProSteel?

BTW, i downloaded Advance Steel and it feels like ProSteel in many ways. However, I already ran into a problem trying to create weld preparations on a small boxed sleeve. If it can't do this then it's pretty useless to me. It could e that I don't know what I'm doing.

You can see some of the work I do in the link below. All of that I modeled in AutoCAD using old school boolean operations.

Screen Shots

Also,

What forums to ProSteel users use most frequently?

We use V8i Select Series 6.

I am not sure now, but when we started using it, it was only compatible to 2014.

I am using Autocad 2013 Vanilla.

Bentley support is definitely way behind Autocad support.

Advanced Steel licenses a lot of the Bentley tools, so I would expect it to feel similar.

I took two five day classes in Pro Steel, as did the rest of our team.

I asked the instructor, who despite being on the ProSteel creative team, which one he prefered using, and found it quite telling that he said he favored working on the Autodesk version, as opposed to the pure Microstation Bentley one.

Not really sure which forums are the best, we have pretty much figured out most of what we needed to in house, or directly with the instructor who taught us the software.