Meet GRAITEC STEEL – Steel Detailing, Stairs and Railings in Autodesk Inventor

We’re excited to introduce GRAITEC STEEL, a steel detailing and fabrication plugin for Autodesk Inventor and Advance Steel, giving detailers one platform for modelling, connections, stairs, railings and fabrication output. We’re excited to introduce a host of capabilities for Inventor users: parametric one and multi-flight stairs, cage ladders with multiple exit and cage options, a full set of railing types from wall-mounted to key clamp, and the Special Part Manager reading native IPT files directly.

Learn more about GRAITEC STEEL for Inventor below:

Stairs and Railings in Inventor, for the First Time

Until now, Autodesk Inventor has had no dedicated tool for building stairs and railings, which left a genuinely time-consuming part of steel detailing to manual modelling. GRAITEC STEEL for Inventor closes that gap. The Stairs and Railings modules, proven over years on Advance Steel, are now available to Inventor users, so the model reflects what will actually be built and collaboration across design and fabrication holds together.

Access is through a dedicated ribbon: GRAITEC STEEL Stairs & Railings, so the modules sit where you expect them inside Inventor.

This plugin makes the following toolsets available:

• Stairs. One Flight, with or without an intermediate landing. Two Flights in L, U and Z configurations. Three Flights in U and Z configurations.
• Cage ladders. The full cage ladder module, carried across to Inventor.
• Railings. Standard, Kee Clamps, Ball Post and Wall Railing types.

The modules carry the same capabilities and options on both platforms, with a small number of exceptions in this first version. What worked in Advance Steel behaves the way you already know it inside Inventor.

Special Part Manager, native to Inventor

The Stairs and Railings modules arrive alongside the Special Part Manager, which lets you bring in the specific special parts those modules draw on. The Special Part Manager previously worked with DWG files only. For Inventor it has been adapted to read native IPT files directly, so your Inventor components go in without conversion and stay usable inside the macros.

Shared options across both platforms

Several options in this plugin are available in Inventor as well as Advance Steel, so the two platforms move forward together, and in sync.

PIP Standard D cage type

The D-shaped cage, sometimes described as semicircular, has been added to the available cage types. It comes from the PIP standard used in the North American market, so detailers working to that standard get compliant results directly from the macro, on Inventor as on Advance Steel. The new shape inherits the flexibility and accuracy of the existing cage types, so nothing is given up to gain the coverage.

Individual support extension

Every cage ladder support can now be extended independently, on the pair and to the exact dimension the site calls for, all held live inside the macro. That means a ladder ties cleanly into an inclined or irregular substructure straight from the dialog, and the whole arrangement stays fully parametric, with the macro intact.

Stair landing nose and toe angle control

Landing nose and toe angles can now be set to match the tread angle directly, with a new combo option for folded plate tread types. Treads and landings line up in one move, giving you consistent geometry across the stair and clean, fabrication-ready detail without any downstream correction.

Rotation for frame connectors

Infill panel connectors in Standard Railing and Double Post Railing can now be rotated to different angles. Small change, and it removes a common reason for dropping out of the macro.

On the horizon: the Graitec Assistant

This release also introduces the Graitec AI Assistant, working directly inside the model to read it, act on it, and generate elements from a prompt. Availability today is Advance Steel only, on a named user license. It points to where AI-assisted steel detailing is heading, and Inventor users can follow that story as it develops.

Learn more about AI for steel detailing in our latest ebook

In the background

Migration to .NET 10: GRAITEC STEEL has been updated to stay fully compatible with .NET 10, across both the Advance Steel and Inventor modules.

Graitec Updater: A centralised update manager now built into GRAITEC STEEL. One tool handles updates across all installed Graitec products, running silently in the background, detecting and downloading with clear notification when updates are ready. Users keep full control: install now, postpone, skip a version, or disable updates per product.

Compatibility: GRAITEC STEEL runs on Autodesk Inventor 2026 and 2027, and Autodesk Advance Steel 2026 and 2027. Installation is a single setup that adapts to the platforms present on the machine, and a single trial license activates the features available for that platform.