Discover the simple method to create staircases in 3D design software, removing the daunting aspect of manually calculating the riser height and starting point. Learn to use the mirror tool and other features to make your design process efficient and accurate.
Key Insights
- The article provides insight on how to create staircases in a 3D design software by using the architecture tab and selecting the 'stair' option. This allows you to use preloaded types and calculate the number of risers based on floor height.
- To create a staircase, start by establishing your base level and top level. Then, set your run width and calculate the number of risers you need. The software can help you create precise measurements and includes a helper on the screen that tells you how many risers you've created and how many remain.
- The article also details how to use the mirror tool to duplicate identical stairwells and adjust the alignment of the stairs to fit the design. It stresses the importance of unchecking the constrain button for unrestricted movement and provides tips on adjusting annotations.
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With the curtain walls added in, one of the last major building components that we need to do is add some stairs. If you notice, we do have a level one and a level two, but really no way to get from one to the next. So let's go ahead and see if we can resolve that.
So let's go to level one. And we'll use this as our prototype. And then since there are two exactly identical stairwells here, we can use the mirror tool to put the other one on the top.
Stairs can be a little daunting at first, especially if you've drawn them manually in, say AutoCAD or drawn them by hand manually, because it can take a while. And there's a little bit of math that you have to do to figure out exactly the riser height and kind of where to start the stair and all that. Well, here's the beauty of it.
We're using a powerful computer that's going to be able to do all of that math for us. And we can make this as simple or as difficult as we want it to be for us. But I tend to lean towards the simple method here.
If we go from our architecture tab to stair, there are only a few settings in here that we really have to be worried about. And what's awesome is they'll come preloaded with these types. So a seven-inch max riser with an 11-inch tread, which means it'll calculate based on our base level and our top level and any of these offsets, how many risers we actually need.
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So you can see here that with a max of seven-inch riser and a 12-foot floor-to-floor height, we're going to be looking at around 21 risers based on that. And it actually gives me the riser heights down to the 256th of an inch, which is pretty precise. So to draw the stair, I would have a hard time trying to draw it exactly in this stairwell here.
So what I'll do is I'll start it off to the side. And after I've established my base level and my top level, the next thing that I do is I always establish my run width. In this case, we'll adjust it to be three feet eight inches.
And just knowing how many I want and where I want the stair to start is pretty much the way to do this. If I want to have, say, 11 risers and then 10 risers to make up that 21, then I can do that by starting the stair, say, at the bottom here, just clicking and then running it out. You can see there's this helper on the screen that's telling me how many risers I've created and how many are remaining.
If I move this to the point where it says there's 11 created and 10 remaining, then I know that's what I want for this first leg. This is going to be a U-shaped stair or a switchback, so since I'm going to have 10, I'd like them to start and stop at the same point.
So what I'll do is I'll skip one. I don't know exactly where I need to go here, but I do know that the line I create for the stair is based on the center of the stair run. If I move up a little bit, even over-exaggerate it, that's fine.
Then I can click at a point and I can kind of move it across to create my stair. You see here, the landing is automatically created. It's obvious to me, and probably to you as well, that this stair is way bigger than it needs to be.
What we can do is make the adjustment here by aligning the stair to these points. I can select the whole thing and use the move tool, moving it, say, from this end point here to the end point at the corner there.
Sometimes this constrain button will be checked, and if it's like that, then it's hard to move it outside of the vertical or horizontal, so make sure that's unchecked.
Then we'll pop in here and move it into place. The next thing we need to do is move this next run down into place. I'll select that top run and use the move tool again.
This time I'll do it from this stringer point to the face of the wall, and that puts my stair exactly where I need it. When I hit Finish, it'll complete the sketch for my stair.
The only thing that I like to do here at this point is adjust the annotation—and now we have our stair—so we can do it the easy way here.
I can select both the annotation and the stair, and I can use my Mirror Pick Axis and that handy grid line three again. If our fingers are crossed, then we shouldn't have any issues, right? It looks like everything landed exactly where we want it to be.
And now we have stairs going up to level two.
