Thursday, September 10, 2009

Dutch Stair Winders - Part II

A comment in my previous post asked about stringers that are exposed. Since I took the easy way out and said that most of these stairs are tucked away inside walls it is only natural that someone would like to do it the hard way!

In my reply to the comment I mentioned a few options that come to mind: In-Place Family, Walls and Edit Wall Profile, Railing with custom profiles or just accept the way the boundary/stringers are created by Revit (yeah I know that last one isn't very tasty). Here's an image of the result for the stair using an In-Place family. It's late and I was lazy so I only did one side, that and the other side is still buried in a wall, that's my story anyway.

I created a VIDEO that shows what I did. You can listen and watch here instead.

Another approach might be to build it as a component family. Use the basic stair tool to provide the typical representation of the stair but build a more exacting version in the family editor. This version can be placed so that 3D views benefit from it and sections will show a more accurate representation of the stair. Naturally you'd work your way toward this, no need to do it in schematic design but later when you are ready to really design the stair it might make sense?

[Edit - added images]
James Savage shared a couple screen captures with me for his approach to these stairs. It is similar to the approach the Jeff used in his video, adjusting where the boundary lines start and stop...moving them forward or back along the stair path. This gets pretty close. For complete control the in-place family will still offer more options. At least James worried about supporting the other side of the stair! Thanks for sharing them with me.


4 comments:

Erik said...

THUNDER STEALER!!!! :p

I have been working on a Stair-as-component family for the past couple of evenings. Never heard of anyone else thinking that way till now.

Steve said...

Well Scott Brown posted an example making a stair as a series of families at Zoogdesign, now AUGI, in August of 2003! Here's the url:

http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?t=991&highlight=Stair

Bjorn Keulemans said...

Thanks for the thoughts and the effort in posting an answer.

Just as we've been doing for a while: try to make it work with the stairs module. Clean up any horrible connections with in-place components.

Indeed, pick your poison. Just good to hear I'm no the only one drinking it.

Thanks!

Erik said...

2003! I wasn't even using Revit then. I guess that's the problem (well ONE of my problems, anyway.)

Nice AUGI post. I'll try to post my iteration of a Stair-as-Component on my blog when I get it more fleshed out.