The sketch that starts most beams in this country is not a CAD file. It is a biro on the back of a bar bending schedule, a span written down as 4.2m, a UDL written down as 25kN/m, and two triangles for the supports. Every engineer we have watched work starts there, and then spends the next forty minutes typing that sketch into software that would rather have received a model.
Movastruct starts where you start. You photograph the sketch, or you describe it in a sentence, and the model is the thing we produce — not the thing we demand.
What the ninety seconds are spent on
The first pass is extraction. We read the geometry off the sketch: how many spans, how long, what sits at each end, where the point loads land and what they carry. Numbers written next to a member are the hardest part, because a 25 beside a beam could be a load, a depth, or a bar mark, and only the context tells you which.
The second pass is interrogation. Sketches are ambiguous and honest software says so. If a support could reasonably be pinned or fixed, we ask. If the load has no units, we ask. We would rather cost you two questions than hand you a moment diagram built on a guess you never got the chance to correct.
Only then do we analyse. Stiffness method, the same as it has always been, running against the model you just confirmed. The shear force and bending moment diagrams that come back are ordinary structural analysis — there is nothing clever or probabilistic about the numbers themselves, and that is the entire point.
The part that is not automated
You are. Every model we build is laid out for you to read before it is designed: the span, the supports, the loads, the assumptions we made and flagged. It takes fifteen seconds to check, and it is the only fifteen seconds in the workflow that we will never take away from you.
The engineer signs the drawing. Not the software, and not the model that helped draw it.