Automatic Design of Members

To avoid the need to manually design members or groups of members within any model, MasterKey: Steel Design provides a number of automatic design options. The automatic design uses the section type assigned to a member or members to control the type of section used and then the software runs a trial of all sections, starting with the smallest section of that type, until it finds the smallest section which passes all the design checks for the type of brief applied to the member under consideration. To provide control to the user, there are three types of automatic design which the user is able to select. To allow further controls, the automatic design for multiple members only applies to the members visible in the graphics window. It is therefore possible to use the viewing filters to control the elements of a model that are visible and so only apply the automatic design to those members.

The automatic design options are:

 - auto size the selected member.

 - auto size all visible members to be the same section.

The automatic design options are located at the bottom of the Section AutoDesign tab.