Discover how to customize a 3D stair element in intricate detail using a range of design parameters and features for optimal visualization. Learn techniques such as isolating the stair for a focused approach, duplicating and editing types, and adjusting support and depth features to attain a distinct look.
Key Insights
- The article provides a comprehensive guide to customizing a 3D stair element, beginning with isolating the stair to effectively work on it without affecting other design elements.
- The author introduces the concept of editing and duplicating the stair type, allowing the user to make numerous changes to various parameters without permanently altering the defaults or affecting other stairs.
- The article emphasizes the ability to customize the depth, width, and support type of the stair stringer, demonstrating how these adjustments significantly change the aesthetic and structural proportions of the stair.
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Now we're going to go through the process of customizing this stair, and I like to do this in 3D because it gives us a good view of it. Before we do that, though, I'm going to show you a trick. We can actually isolate this stair.
If I go to the glasses down here, I can say isolate element, and now we're just working on this stair element. We'll address the railing afterwards. If I select the stair, I'm going to go ahead and do edit type and duplicate because we don't want to mess with the other stairs.
And I'm just going to call it feature stair. A lot of these parameters are going to stay the same, the ones that are really fundamental like the 7- and 11-inch for the riser height and tread depth. But we are going to go in and make a lot of changes to the ones that you see below here.
We'll start with the supports here. So the right support is set to "Stringer—Closed." And what we can do is we can change that from the closed stringer to an open stringer, which means it'll let us set it down below.
And then we can offset that by any distance that we're looking for. If I were to offset this by a value of, say, one foot, and then do the exact same thing on the left side. We'll go ahead and say carriage, and then we'll offset that by one foot.
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And we are going to make some other changes here, but I want to make sure we do this incrementally so that we can look at, and understand, the types of changes that we're making here. If we were to do this, I can hit OK. And let's take a look at what it does.
And you can see it moves the stringer inboard of the stair. And that offset that you're seeing there is this one-foot dimension here and here. And then by setting it to the carriage type, the open type, it's trimming it below the stair.
And so just by doing that, we get a very different look than what we had before. So I'm going to go ahead and select it again. And we'll say edit type.
And one of the things you may notice is when we look at the actual stringer size, it looks a little wimpy. And so we can change that because we can set a profile for that stringer. If I were to select it again and go to edit type, we can change that support type.
So instead of just two-inch width, when I click on it here, you can see this is an actual type with actual parameters. And so I can change these values here, including assigning a specific material. And so if I wanted to, I could use another type, which would be a custom one that we make, which would be a HSS or a tube steel type stringer.
And so we can go in and we can duplicate this. So I can say duplicate, and we can change the name. And so I like to call it HSS stringer, just so I know that this is going to be a custom tube steel.
And so these parameters do become pretty important. So the depth on the run, we want to increase that to one foot. So that's going to make it deeper.
And then the depth on the landing is going to be fine. And then the width, we want to beef that up a little bit because a 2-inch-wide by 12-inch piece of steel, even if it is structurally sound enough, is just not going to look right. We're going to make that four inches. The material—we're going to get back to that in a little bit here once we start applying materials to the stair.
But for right now, we're going to leave it at by category. But that is something that you can customize. So I'm going to hit OK.
And then we're going to change the support on the left one to the other type as well. And we've already created it. We don't have to worry about changing it here, because it's already a type we've created.
We're going to hit OK. And now you can see we've got a pretty deep stringer for our stair. And they look a little too close together to me.
So let's go ahead and take a look at it again. So I’m going to select it and go to edit type. And this is an easy fix.
If I wanted to make those not so far from the edge, I can change that to six inches. And then I can go in and if I'm looking at the stringer, it’s, say, one foot—maybe a little bit too much. So I'm going to make that eight inches and hit OK.
And now I've kind of squeezed it towards the edge more. And then I also reduced the depth. Now it seems like it’s a better proportion to me.
And so that gives us the ability to customize the structural framing of the stair to match more of what our potential actual design is going to be.
