New project wizard

Four tabs before the first wall

In LSF, almost everything the calculation needs is decided once for the whole project: the ceiling height of each story, the section of each role (stud, track, header, floor joist, chord), the steel, the stud spacing, the weight of the boards and the wind. CalcSteel gathers these decisions in a single wizard, Project settings, opened by the first button of the LSF panel.

The wizard has four tabs: Building envelope, Structure · sections, Loads and Wind action. None of them draws or calculates anything. They store the configuration that the drawing and the calculation read later.

The example house starts here: single story, 9 x 7 m, 2.80 m ceiling height, a roof, no intermediate floor. A new LSF project in Brazil already starts roll-formed on the FRAMECAD F325iT, and this page follows that setup.

• 4: tabs: Envelope, Structure, Loads, Wind
• 2.80 m: ceiling height of the house, on a single story
• 600 mm: stud spacing, matched to the 1.20 m board
• 89 kgf/m²: dynamic wind pressure in class A, V₀ = 40 m/s

One decision per project, not per wall

An LSF house has hundreds of pieces, and almost all of them repeat the same choices: the stud is the same section in every wall, so is the track, and there is a single spacing. Asking for this on every wall would be a mistake. The wizard asks once and every drawing tool uses the answer: the wall starts with the ceiling height of its story, the studs at the project spacing and the section of the role.

Modulation, loads and wind

The wizard does not cite a standard in each field, but each field answers to one. Four matter as soon as the project is created:

Wind by NBR 6123:2023

NBR 6123 is the Brazilian standard for wind loads on buildings.

The setup of the 9 x 7 m house

Almost everything stays at the Brazil default that a new project already brings. Two things change, both in the wind: the class of the house and the terrain of the site. This is the setup the other LSF pages use.

Terrain: choose the one of the site

A neighborhood of houses is category III or IV; open country, II. The rougher the terrain, the lower S₂ and the lower the wind. Without knowing the terrain, II is the safe side: it gives more wind than a suburb would.

Class: the house is A

A new project comes in class B, for buildings between 20 and 50 m. The 9 m house is A, and class A gives slightly higher wind: 89 kgf/m². A short gust catches the whole house at once.

1. Start a blank project

In the editor, the first screen asks how you want to start. To follow the example, choose New blank model: an empty workspace. The project by AI and the DXF or IFC import are other starts; the AI one has its own page (see Build by chat).

2. Go to the LSF tab and open Project settings

In the bottom bar, switch to the LSF tab. The LSF panel appears on the left, and the first button, in blue, is Project settings. Below the panel, the hint gives the order: start in Project settings, then Exterior wall. The wizard also opens from a shortcut in the strap, bracing, column and header boxes.

3. Read the header: market and fabrication

The dark strip at the top shows the project market, Brazil · NBR 14762, and the fabrication. In a new project, Roll-formed is already selected and the machine is the FRAMECAD F325iT. The market and what it fills in are in Market and catalog.

4. Check stories, roof, intermediate floor and ceiling height

The first tab opens with the example house: 1 story, roof With, intermediate floor Without, total height 2.80 m. The drawing is only a diagram; the dimension on the left is the ceiling height, and it is clickable: click, type in meters, Enter saves and Esc cancels. Changing the dimension after the walls exist redraws the walls of that story, in a single Ctrl+Z step.

The + button adds one more story, with the ceiling height of the last one; each gets its own dimension in the drawing and a field in Level names (up to 24 characters; left empty, it keeps the default name, such as "Térreo", the ground floor). For the house, go back to 1 with −.

5. Check the section of each role

The Structure · sections tab lists the 14 roles in three groups, each with its own illustration: walls, intermediate floor, and roof and truss. The strip at the top says where they came from, Perfis de FRAMECAD F325iT (FRAMECAD F325iT sections), and the Default button resets all of them at once. In the walls, stud and track come out in C 89x41/39x12x0.95, 1.38 kg/m; the header, in 1.15 mm.

Clicking a row opens the picker for that role. In a roll-formed project it only shows the sections the machine forms: for the F325iT stud, the same C 89x41 in four thicknesses, from 0.55 to 1.15 mm.

Stick-built, steel, spacing and boards

To see the difference, select Stick-built in the header: the machine list disappears and the sections change together, to the stock-bar ones. Go back to Roll-formed and the machine sections come back identical, including any you edited: each model keeps its own.

The right-hand column completes the tab:

6. Check the loads, in kgf/m²

Three groups, each with its sum in the corner. PP Parede (wall dead load) is the weight of the boards and finishes on both sides. Entrepiso (intermediate floor) is grayed out, because the house has none. Telhado (roof) applies because the roof is set to With; once a roof is drawn, the tile weighs what that roof chose. The fields go from 0 to 1000.

7. Fill in the wind and change the class to A

On the left, the standard fields; in the middle, the isopleth map, clickable, which fills in V₀; on the right, the coefficients of each face by wind angle and the blue box with the dynamic pressure q. Check the V₀ of the municipality, the terrain and the residence group (S₃ = 1.00), and click A in the class.

Class A

Largest facade dimension up to 20 m, with Fr = 1.00 (NBR 6123, 5.3.3). The 9 m house falls in it, and the q in the box is the one from the hand calculation.

The box uses the total height of the project (here, 2.80 m; below 5 m the calculation uses 5 m) and shows Cpi 0.00 / −0.20 for the closed house. The footer sentence says the rest: the load only goes to the members once there are walls.

8. Finish

On the last tab, the right-hand button becomes Finish. It closes the wizard and brings back the plan, still empty. Nothing was drawn and nothing was written into the project: the configuration is saved and goes with the project when it gets its first wall.

The hint below the panel already points to the next step: start in Project settings, then Exterior wall. The first wall of the house is in Exterior walls. Market and catalog explains where the defaults you just checked came from, and Plan and 3D shows the plan and the 3D where the house will be drawn.

Field by field

Where people go wrong in the wizard

1. Leaving class B on a house. A new project comes in B, for buildings between 20 and 50 m. The house is A: click A before you finish.
2. Roof "Without" with a roof drawn. The wizard warns in amber: the roof stays in the calculation with its weight. To take it out, delete the roof.
3. A spacing that does not match the module. The spacing accepts any value from 200 to 1200 mm. With 500 mm and a 1.20 m board, the joints end up with no stud behind them.
4. Loads copied without checking. The default board weights come from the app itself, not from a standard table. Check them against the data sheet of the board that goes into the project.
5. Board bracing turned on. The block says "opt-in · fora de norma" (outside the standard). When on, it uses the board to restrain distortion and shorten the buckling length of the stud. The example house is braced with blocking and straps (see Straps and blocking).
6. Finish grayed out, with "N missing". It is the only refusal of the wizard: the project market does not define some field, and its tab gets an amber count. In Brazil nothing is missing. Market and catalog covers this.

What the wizard hands to the engine

The wizard does not calculate. When you click Calculate, the engine reads the configuration and uses it like this: the steel becomes fy and fu; the section of each role becomes the section of the members; PP Parede multiplies the gross wall area and goes down through the upright pieces; the intermediate floor goes to the floor joists; a roof with no drawn structure goes to the top tracks of the eave walls (or to the loose trusses); and the wind becomes pressure panels per wall, slope and gable. The self-weight of the steel is not in the loads: the engine computes it from the members.

The path, in one line

New blank model → LSF tab → Project settings → Roll-formed, FRAMECAD F325iT → Envelope: 1 story, 2.80 m, roof With → Structure: machine sections, ZAR-230, spacing 600 → Loads checked → Wind: V₀ of the site, terrain, residence S₃, class A → Finish.

The example so far

• 1: story, with a roof
• 2.80 m: ceiling height
• 600 mm: between studs
• 89 kgf/m²: of q, class A