Hi, I’m trying to model a railing for a straight staircase with a flared/curved base. I’m not familiar with the Follow Me tool and don’t know if this application would work with that command as there are different planes of the railing. Would appreciate tips on how to make this work and if I’m missing anything altogether when designing this staircase. Many thanks!
railing for flared staircase.skp (97.2 KB)
Eneroth’s Upright Extruder can help with this sort of thing,
You may need to repair some holes or scale up depending on the design to avoid tiny face issues.
But here’s a quick version. I doubled the number of segments in you curved section to make it smoother.
You might be better off trying Eneroth Upright Extruder for the sloping curved part here.
FollowMe as expected twists the extrustion round the curve:
Upright extruder does a better job but my profile has too many segments and leaves a few holes from the SU small edges issue.
Either scale up, or use a simpler handrail profile.
Works fine scaled up, then scaled back down again, or use the Dave Method (search the forum for it if you need to)/
There’s still a rather ugly kink where the curve starts. Maybe you could get a smoother transition by drawing a helix with a near-tangent join to the straight rail?
Take a look at this older thread. It may give some insight on railings.
Thank you! This looks like what I’m looking for. Can you share how you got the rail to be so smooth once extruded? I see you corrected just a small area toward the start of the rail but mine has a TON of face and line issues. I’ve uploaded my file again - the one on the staircase had the rail shape disconnected from the path and has a few issues and the copy away from the stairs has the shape glued to the path - is that a thing? Why are there so many issues with this one? And why doesn’t it follow the whole length of the path?
railing for flared staircase.skp (508.2 KB)
If you are not creating the model for 3D printing, then you do not need 50 segments for that curve.
3D model 
railing-2.skp (616.8 KB) (change back to the units of measure in which you work, the model is set in the metric system)
Thank you so much!