Making stairs for college project

vdmx

Im pretty new to sketchup, i play around with it for my college projects (i study interior design) to help me get ideas down quickly and effectively. I struggle sometimes quite a bit but i know in time i will learn, however i am really struggling with making a set of stairs which i need urgently for one project. I am trying to create a stairway which is curved. I have played around with arcs and bezier curves trying to create an overall floorprint but i cant seem to do that. A couple things that would be useful to me is being able to measure a curved line and being able to create curved lines which i can control the lengths of. Overall im pretty stuck on how to do this and hope some people might have tips or examples. I looked at tutorials and so on but mostly what i found was how to do a spiral staircase.
thanks

mac1

@vdmx said:

Im pretty new to sketchup, i play around with it for my college projects (i study interior design) to help me get ideas down quickly and effectively. I struggle sometimes quite a bit but i know in time i will learn, however i am really struggling with making a set of stairs which i need urgently for one project. I am trying to create a stairway which is curved. I have played around with arcs and bezier curves trying to create an overall floorprint but i cant seem to do that. A couple things that would be useful to me is being able to measure a curved line and being able to create curved lines which i can control the lengths of. Overall im pretty stuck on how to do this and hope some people might have tips or examples. I looked at tutorials and so on but mostly what i found was how to do a spiral staircase.
thanks

Select entity info, some of the SU tools will give you the info you want and you can also change some of the parameters there also. You should also be able to apply some of the concepts you see in one example to your specific needs. That is part of education. If you draw an arc(s) on the ground plane and then use the offset tool to set a width, then connect the ends together that will give you a surface you can the extrude up and by turning view hinden geo on you can lay out stair risers and treads which will follow that curve. That will give you some learning on using the inference engine but will be very tedious. There are a number of plugins for stair design but I could not find any quickly for you specific case. Do a forum search for stair design, stair builder etc to find those/ here are some tuts on stairs http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=sketchup+stairs+tutorial&search_type=&aq=0&oq=Sketchup+Stairs
Hope this helps some

TIG

There's a curved stair tutorial here... If you don't have a 2D CAD plan [as used in the example] simply draw the 2D plan in Sketchup first and group it, then work off that...
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?p=158602#p158602