Alignment tools

- [Instructor] Those of you who work with steel know that the center of the beam is not always necessarily the reference point that we use to align the steel build in grid or the frame. Sometimes we align using the top of steel, the outer edge of the flange. We have some additional alignment tools that we can use to make sure that our steel is both rotated and positioned correctly, so let's go ahead and open our exercise file. Desktop, Exercise Files, 08_04. And take a look at the steel that we modeled in the previous video. So some of the alignment tools that we have, this is one that we'll use a lot. Extend Steel to Steel. So what we can do is we can take a couple of steel objects just by picking the objects and hit Return and extend to choose the object that you want to extend them to, and just by using this combination of choose this, this, and this, and this, Return, extend to here. Extend to here. So you can see how you can very quickly start to build your steel frame without having too much effort. So I'm going to turn our current points back on, just to make sure that we've got everything lined up, and I'm going to do the same thing over here. I'm going to do an Extend this beam and this beam to here, this and this to here, So you can see that we can very quickly look at these beams and model this grid as it is on the point cloud. So you'll see that it's not necessarily always square. So we have some additional tools that we can look at to check our alignment. So I'm just going to turn off all points, and look at some of the graphics that we have here. So when we're looking at editing a beam, I'm just going to choose just a random beam on here. I'm going to edit this beam, and look at the options that we have. We can swap that out. I can just go out and swap that for a different size. If I know that's a different size, I can swap that out, and make that edit without having to refit that beam. We can also come and we can toggle the axis, so we can rotate it around a center axis. And if you want to visualize the axis, we have a couple of tools that we can toggle on here. So if I use the Visualize Beam Axis, I can actually see the axis of the beam that was created when we placed this. So this was all placed using the center line. If, perchance, I wanted to have these inserted and my base be something other than the center line, I can do that too. So I can choose the Edit Beam, and I'm going to pick one of the steel beams here, and I'm going to toggle the axis. Now if you watch what happens, you'll see that axis, the one that's highlighted in heavy red. That beam is moving around from the edges of the flange, you can see how that placement works. Maybe gives it a little bit different view here, I'm going to zoom in a little bit. And I'm just going to keep toggling that axis. Let me go through that again. And you'll see it's placed that beam, that axis is now showing as being at the top of the steel. So again, I'm just going to come and edit the beam, and toggle the axis until I have that beam inserted the way I want it and the right orientation. So I'm bringing it back to the center so that it's just like all the others, and I'm going to just say Finish. So we can also look at the alignment of the beams. So this is just going to give us a visualization of how our beams are aligned. So we can see the axis, the center, the rotation, and if I look at this on an elevation view, you can see that when I zoom in, not everything's aligned perfectly. These are slightly above, slightly below, the axes are slightly different, I'd expect to see these all lined up perfectly in a perfect design world, whereas, again, we're looking at as-built conditions. So just again, turn it around here, we can see that these are not always perfectly aligned as they were modeled on the point cloud. So what we can do is I'm just going to toggle that to View Off. A number of alignment tools, like for example, if I take one of these beams, I'm just going to manually rotate one of these beams. I'm just going to kind of rotate that sort of off of square here. We have a tool that allows us to bring everything back into perpendicular, so I'm going to choose the Adjust Steel, and I'm going to take these beams, actually, I'm just going to take the one beam. Let me just redo that again. We'll take this one beam here just so we can see it work, and I'm going to say Adjust To, I'm going to choose this beam. And you'll notice that it's taken that beam that I've initially rotated and asked it to bring it to be parallel to this beam. So this is a good way for us to take all of our module steel and bring it into squares, so for example, if we take everything here, and we model that to there, you'll see that it's brought everything into alignment based perpendicular on that piece of steel right there. So I'm going to undo that alignment change and look at another tool that we have, which is similar to what we have in piping. Now, I showed you when we looked at an elevation view of all this different steel that nothing was particularly aligned perfectly. You can see here we've got a variation of the center lines are not quite right, you can see the different heights of the steel here. Now if we want to bring that into completely aligned, we could apply constraints, much like we did with piping, to bring everything back into an orthogonal arrangement. And to do that, I'm just going to zoom out a little bit here and I'm going to use Apply Constraints For Steel. Now, we have some tolerances that we can do here, but again, I'm not going to go into this. We're going to use these out of the box. This is something for more advanced users, but I'm just going to select the beams, I'm going to use Select All here, and I'm going to apply constraints. Now, you probably saw everything shift a little bit just as you would with piping, and if we look, we can see everything's nice and square. And if we look on an elevation view, now everything is perfectly aligned. You can see all the center lines and the axes have all come into alignment together. So by doing that, we've taken what was modeled in the point cloud and created a gridded steel that's all in alignment and it's all square, and we can start to bring that into detail package and work on that. So you can see there's many different parameters that we can set to make sure we're working within our project-defined tolerances. These settings are better suited to advanced users, so we haven't gone into them in this course, but I want to make sure that you understand that as you become more proficient with the PointSense tools you can go in and set up alignment tools to suit your tolerances and company standards.