Hello fellow modelers!
I am creating a custom spiral staircase and I used to create these things in blender/maya but the workflow is different in sketchup and I was wondering if there were any tips to make these look smooth?
Luckily this is just a concept model so it doesn’t need to be perfect. But I am wondering how I would make something like this perfect in sketchup. Mainly, the handrail and beneath the stairs where it needs to be smooth.
How did you create the handrail in the first place? If I were modeling it I would create a path and profile and then use Eneroth Upright Extruder on it. The smoother the path the smoother the extrusion will be.
I tried it with the upright extruder, I traced the tops of each tread corner but that method creates choppy corners. THe images you’re seeing are my attempting to move vertex points around trying to smooth out the curve (with no luck) I gave up on the upright extruder because it kept crashing my system. Even so, it still doesn’t fix the fact that i suck at modeling helixes by hand, lol
That’s kind of a problem with stair rails. You’d think that working off a common point like the front corner of the tread would work and it does for a straight stair, but when the stairs aren’t straight and the treads aren’t a constant width, the rail ends up being wobbly. There’s probably an extension for modeling stairs but if I were doing it, I would create a vertical surface in line with the center of the rail and use something like Tools on Surface to daw the curved parts of the path. I’ll see if I can make an example.
I wonder why it crashes your system. I’ve had very good experience with it.
Who knows, I used to use it all the time but all these OS and sketchup updates are throwing me for a loop. I’m tired of trying to troubleshoot. I just wanna model. lol. I’m testing some methods to get it right. It’s not 100% necessary for me but its nice to be able to have it look right for clients before the stair guy does his magic.
I came up with a solution natively in sketchup. It involved intersecting a plane that was in line with my treads with the hole cutout in the middle of the stairs… It feels like theres a better way but this came out pretty smooth.
That’ll work. I’ll scrap my example.
Thank you for your efforts!
