Stairs in SketchUp

Although the stairs are utilitarian elements are often a focal point in the interior space. To create stairs with Google Sketchup is not difficult but it can sometimes take a long time and when not to say, somewhat repetitive and boring. That is why today I will show you 3 types of ladders made ​​with the Stair Maker plugin by Sdmitch that streamlines the process incredibly. The plugin is available in sketchucation.com

The plugin creates 4 types of stairs: Normal, Spiral (which is awesome to have this possibility), U-shaped and Ladder. The plugin offers different parameters which vary the thickness of the tread, wide, high and even angles.

In this post I will show you four stairs starting from the alternatives offered by the plugin and then modified. The first step shown below was made ​​by combining the options Normal and Ladder, using 1.5" Step Depth variable for separate steps.
To create the handrail and stringers it was taken advantage of the basic lines drawn by the plugin using the plugin Taper Maker by G. Terry Ross, at http://www.drawmetal.com/. This plugin let you align a face perpendicular to a path and so the tubular sections were completed.

This picture shows the components and plugins used for each.

The second step was done using the alternative Spiral with an angle of 30 degrees for each tread.

The previous design actually consists of 2 stairs to which were applied the Flip Along command to change the direction of the Run. In the below image the stair has a step angle of 15 degrees and a step depth of the same height as the rise.

The third stair seems complicated though by the curves but it was very easy to create it using the Normal option and Solid commands. These are the steps:

1. Create the stair with the Normal alternative.

2. Apply the Outer Shell command from the Solid tools to create a geometry with volume properties.

3. Create a second solid, to apply Subtract from the Solid tools to the Normal stair.

4. Subtract the curved volume using the Subtract function of Solid tools

5. Create another volume for the end of the last two or three steps and apply Outer Shell or Union of the Solid tools.

6. With Shift + Erase hide unwanted lines.

7. Taking advantage of certain lines created initially for the rail the rest of the geometry was completed. For the straight rail the plugin Balustrade with Components by TIG was used. A component was created for balusters using the Follow Me tool. Taper Maker plugin was used for the curved handrail. This image shows the plugins used for the creation of the rail.

I hope these tips can boost your imagination up next time you face to create a nice stair.