Hello,
Could you introduce "Dynamic Pictures" in STAAD?
Engineers spend a good amount of time in generating clearly annotated and detailed reports within all project's lifecycle. In a competitive environment, hitting timelines is paramount. A dynamic picture would completely eliminate routine tasks and help save a decent amount of time when project changes happen and a structure needs to be re-analyzed and reports updated to reflect the revised results that meets project's expectations.
This "dynamic pictures" of a structure ( taken in a plane or 3D ) will automatically update all results/plate contours, reactions etc. "shown in the picture" after the model has been re-analyzed .
You may consider including a new button that can instruct the program to "update all pictures in the report based on new analyses results ". This revised report can quickly be printed & shipped out to the project team for review in minutes. Please refer to attached screenshot .
For large projects containing lots of pictures, this feature would eliminate the constant need for repetitive deleting & re-taking many pictures due to changes in loads, geometry or support conditions. Hence, making the report generation & updating process to be more time efficient overall.
Thank you for posting this idea. It is a concept we have thought about but does involve a number of challenges as the model changes. Consider pictures that are based on views. Objects may have been deleted or added and may need to be added to the view or the view deleted what would be the rules for ensuring the pictures of these? Note that you will soon be able to use OpenSTAAD to control the windows and views so you can create a template in Word that can create views, copy and paste pictures into a document meaning it will be based on the current data.