How to curve a staircase to a specific radius?

You tried on my model, without editing anything and it worked? :joy: I’m laughing from disbelief because things like these happen only to me, I’m that unlucky lol. But I will try tomorrow again. :face_with_hand_over_mouth:

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I did click Yes to reverse. But it seems to work right if I choose No.

It depends what is showing start and end. Notice in mine I move the model slightly and Start and End appear. That tells me which to choose.

I don’t see the Start and End labels like you show and like I’m used to seeing in Shape Bender.

Screenshot%20-%2011_3_2019%20%2C%208_28_43%20PM

They only appear for me when I move the model with my spacemouse.

Weird.

I just have to guess.

@VahePaulman, the stair component needs some work to get the rail to line up correctly.

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Yes It worked for me without changing anything, but my guess is your model got sick of trying because Stringer seems to have a bug that stops it working if it’s been tried too much.
Copy the parts into a new model and try again.
You’ll also need to adjust the components to fit the wedge that is a segment of a curve.
Here I did a quick Fredo Taper to make them fit.

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Yes, I know. It was roughly made because I wanted to see if the plugin will do what I want and then work on details. But I never got past the first phase haha.

50/50 ain’t so bad :smile:

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Hey folks. So I took some time to address the Component Stringer issue with no luck at all. No matter what I do, copy to a new file, work on something brand new, it doesn’t work. I had to give up that idea out of frustration.

However, I did try Shape Bender again, with a different approach.

I separated the railing, the balusters and the stairs and ran the plugin individually on each of them. It’s much cleaner and allows for some further editing and proper texturing later.
One problem however. . . The bottom first and top last stairs are angled and I am left with this massive gap on both sides.

The old Radial Bend, in comparison, bends the stair to the correct axes

The curve needs to be rotated half a segment so it starts/finishes perpendicular.

To pile on, this is similar to what happens with Follow Me.

Out of curiosity, though, what happens on real stairs at that transition from straight run to curved. Maybe what you get with Shape Bender is correct and the top/bottom step of the straight runs needs to be modified.

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Personally I’d be working out what is going on with Stringer, as it is gives you a much more usable set of geometry. Shape bender leaves you with a shape, stinger leaves you with components positioned to the shape you ask for.

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Ah, the famous “rotate the circle”. :slightly_smiling_face: I tried it before, Box and although it fixes the first issue, it brings up a second one: leaves you with unwanted dimensions:

I did try to edit it manually afterwards, Dave. I’ve succeeded with the stair and the bottom part of the balusters but the handrail is confusing. I don’t know what to do with it to merge with the straight one.

I’d also like to try Stringer quite much. I did all I could think of to fix it but with no luck, sadly. Btw, Box, will Stinger also misalign the outer curves like Shape Bender, or will it produce a result like Fredo’s Radial Bend?

Draw your circle as a polygon with the requite number of sides to the size you want but tap ctrl to set the midpoint rather than the vertex as the dimension.

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Have you looked at Flowify from SketchUcation?

Stringer strings together components, so it doesn’t modify anything. So whatever you create within the wedge of the segment will be repeated. I won’t create a curve, it will segment a curve (using your components) exactly as SU does.

Dear all, I did it! :star_struck: 5 hours of experiments, trial and failure and I did it. Everything perfectly aligned and manually tweaked.

@Box, I still couldn’t get that Stringer to work on my PC after all I did, although I downloaded SketchUp Make on my old notebook and it worked there. But I implemented the idea that you gave - to have 1 step of the spiral staircase as a component and work from there. Maximum editability and meticulous precision guaranteed.

In the end, the plugins I used were the Extrude Line Tool, Zorro, Curviloft, 3D Shapes (made a gorgeous Helix curve for the railing with it) and a lot of Clean-Up from ThomThom.
There was a lot of manual editing, however, and I guess that’s the only way, if one is as picky as I am when it comes to 3D modeling.

Now I can sleep calmly, lol. Thank you all for your input and irreplaceable help.
Cheers to all! :blush:

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P.S. I’m aware the second railing and balusters are missing. :face_with_hand_over_mouth: Was just too excited and wanted to post the current result asap, haha. I’ll model them too, to practise the workflow again.

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