The Frame Design Nobody Could Automate – Until Now

A Balustrade Designed End to End by AI

From a plain-language brief, the AI session configures a rule-based frame generator in Design Gear, fills the skeleton with Content Center profiles, then uses Inventor AI to add the base plates and anchors, produce the assembly drawing and export PDF, STEP and DXF cut files – with ModernCAD Memory supplying the drafting standards and file conventions along the way. Claude Opus runs the session.

Rule-Based, Never Identical

Over the last year I’ve met a good number of steel fabricators who make balustrades, fences, gates and stairs from steel and aluminium profiles. Different businesses – same service.

Their work is rule-based, but never identical. Every balustrade follows the same logic, yet every job adapts that logic to suit a specific site, a specific client and a specific set of measurements. Add to this dozens of structural members cut in small batches and assembled together in the shop and you get work that’s both routine and painful at the same time.

This sounds like the perfect case for a configurator, right?

It isn’t. People have tried, but static configurators and iLogic scripts generate the standard segments, then stall the moment a client asks for something the rules didn’t anticipate. In Inventor there’s a deeper obstacle: the out-of-the-box Frame Generator has no API. You can pull the right profiles from Content Center and place them yourself – which is fine for rigid configurators – but you can’t drive Frame Generator itself. For fabricators, whose designs are all different, that closes the traditional automation route.

How the Platform Closes the Gap

Our platform closes the gap in three ways.

1. A rule-based frame generator. For a long time we’d planned to add one to Design Gear, our configurator-building software. Now it exists. Functionally it’s close to the original: it reads the Content Center catalogue for available profiles and fills a skeleton model with generated frame members, end treatments included. Because it’s driven by rules, you define the logic once and it recreates the geometry and re-applies the member edits, on any variation. Like every Design Gear module, it’s configured through a graphical interface – no coding.

2. Let AI do the configuring. Instead of a person working through that interface, the AI session configures the frame itself, following the design brief in plain language. Frame – sorted. But a frame alone isn’t a deliverable.

3. Inventor AI + ModernCAD Memory. Inventor AI, our MCP server for Autodesk Inventor, hands the AI session the rest of the toolbox – additional parts, assemblies and drawings, plus exports to PDF, STEP and DXF for laser or waterjet cutting. Just connecting an AI to Inventor and Design Gear won’t deliver much on its own, because AI doesn’t know how to use CAD. It doesn’t know your drafting preferences, your standards, where files live or how orders are handled. ModernCAD Memory is what teaches it that – including how to reuse old designs and copy them into new projects.

The video above shows the result: a balustrade designed end to end this way, with Claude Opus running the session.

Does Your Shop Live on Repeat-but-Never-Identical Steel Work?

You can watch the full demo series in one place at demos.moderncad.com.au. If your shop lives on repeat-but-never-identical steel work, start the conversation – or drop us a message on LinkedIn or email info@moderncad.com.au. We’ll happily talk through how this would run on your designs.