That’s brilliant, thank you Nathaniel.
This provides so much flexibility to the stair module combined with the railing/baluster presets. Great job once again.
Stair assemblies can get very complicated with all of the various parameters that it only makes sense to create presets. No one wants to have to reinvent.the wheel each time this tool is activated. I probably should have enabled this feature a year ago.
Version 4.5.7 - 05.26.2026
- Enabled presets for posts.
- Added the following L.J. Smith handrail profiles: 684, LJ6011, LJ6A10.
For those interested I am pulling all of my handrail geometry from LJ Smith’s webpage at the following link:
We now have presets for all wall types, windows, doors, garage doors, stairs, railings, shearwalls, beams, in-wall columns and posts. I think that covers most of the major assemblies or sub-assemblies within the Wall plugin. I thought about setting up presets for blocking and/or molding but I just don’t think those tools would be significantly improve with the inclusion of presets, I could be wrong.
If there is anything else related to presets or other minor updates needed for the Wall plugin, please let me know ASAP. I will now be turning my attention back to the complex truss module and I may not remerge for a couple of weeks. That rabbit hole will be all consuming, and it will require my full attention in order to come up with something productive.
Pretty fun to play with!
Version 4.5.9b - 05.31.2026
- Fixed a bug with curved stairs.
- Added the curved stair parameters into the Stairs tab of the Global Settings.
- Enabled landing treads for circular and elliptical stairs.
- Enabled thrust blocks for circular and elliptical stairs.
Tutorial 87 - Curved Stairs (9:20 min.)
I believe all of the information is there to create a basic framing for a curved stair, how you would code this is beyond me!
I will have to give the framing some further consideration. However looking at what you have here I see differences from what other framers have done (not to say that either method is incorrect, just different). That is the reason I am a bit hesitant to try and provide framing for these types of stairs, the methods used to support them are as varied as there are carpenters.
However I am considering providing an option for closed helical stringers. I already worked out the required geometry last night. The geometry is a little fun but really not that hard conceptually. The mesh will be quite large given that each tread has five nodes. The question is can I make the algorithm so it isn’t too computationally expensive.
I’ve been working on close stringers for curved stair cases. The circular variety is pretty much figured out but the elliptical variety still needs an instantaneous adjustment to the stringer depth since the pitch angle of the stairs (slope) is constantly changing. The geometry of a 0.9 eccentric ellipse shows off this distortion quite well. I will hit it again tomorrow and see if I can’t figure out a more accurate algorithm for these stringers. Sometimes I enjoy a good challenge, but this one has certainly had me scratching my head a few times already.
Tutorial 88 - Curved Closed Stairs (5:55 min.)
I don’t know if there is a way to get the textures to work good on these types of complex surfaces, I guess it is something above my pay grade.
I’m pretty confident I can work up a reasonable algorithm for balusters and balusters shoes, however handrails will be a problem. With flared staircases I ran into the problem of the rotating profile. I still have not solved that issue but I may give it another go.
Ever think about the “Oval Office” in the White House? It’s not the Elliptical Office. Beaux Art architects understood that you can’t really do parallel ellipses, but you can do parallel ovals, so that’s why you see ovals used in classical architecture so much. I’m amazed you’ve done as much as have with ellipses, let alone know how to develop it further.
The fact that you cannot actually (mathematically) create parallel ellipses didn’t really occur to me until I wanted to create an elliptical staircase and I wanted the treads to all be the same length (which they are in my module). To compute the outer points or the offset curve of the ellipse I thought I just needed to find some sort of offset equation and I would have my solution, easy peasy right? However I was wrong, there is no ellipse that is the offset of an ellipse, in actual fact you can describe this curve mathematically but it is an 8th degree equation.
In the end it just made sense to empirically calculate the offset by finding the normal vector at each point along the ellipse and then projecting out my set distance or width. The only true ellipse is the inner radius of the stair primitive (and treads and stringer), all other curves are projections of this ellipse.
I know very little about these types of staircases or their construction, to be honest. I’m just reaching out in the dark, and Youtube has been quite helpful. I’ve never actually constructed one of these convoluted masterpieces, or even seen one constructed in real life on any of the construction projects I’ve been associated with, but they sure look cool and all of a sudden my wife is interested in what I do. 
You might glean some ideas from my old scripts. For mimicking the Offset tool…
https://sketchucation.com/pluginstore?pln=TIG_Smart_offset
and for manipulating textures - e.g. rotating about a face.normal to match an angle of a facet.
https://sketchucation.com/pluginstore?pln=TIG-TextureTools
Although their headers say ‘all rights reserved… © …’ I’m happy for you to mine stuff from them…
I will definitely do that. I think at some point I did borrow some of your logic for the offset tool that I created for the foundation plugin that I use to generate or position some of my rebar, but it has been a few years since I worked on that. I’ve been building this stuff out for so long I’m starting to lose track of what I did when.
After mucking around with the follow me API call and a few other algorithms I decided to strike out on my own yesterday, and with a little help from ChatGPT and quite a few iterations I was able to finally generate the closed helical stringers. Using the same principle and by rotating the profile I am now able to generate a similar mesh for the handrails. These are high poly but it does look great and we now have eliminated the twisting issue that I had never resolved using other methods. So a major step forward.
Version 4.6.0b - 06.06.2026
- Added handrails to curved stairs.
- Fixed a bug with labels for railing labels with metric templates.
