Autocad Stair Drawing
Floriana Grundy
@Anonymous Could you be a bit more specific with what you are trying to achieve. I have created numerous stair styles that help indicate the direction of travel and also help to clear up the drawing. Is this what you want?
Did you look at the drawing file that @dbroad attached to his last post (#8) in that thread. In it he has two U-shaped stairs, one starting at Z = 0 and running up 13'-0" and the other starting at Z = 0 and running down 13'-0". From the Top View direction, with the Medium Detail Display Configuration current (Plan Display Representation Set active; Plan Display Representation for Stairs active), the stair going up shows around 6.5 risers to a cut line, with the balance of the stair above shown as an outline in dashed lines. The stair going down shows the full run down to the landing, the landing, and approximately 5.5 risers to a cut line. Since the two stairs are identical, the linework of the "down" stair would fill the dashed area of the "up" stair.
That is pretty much what I would expect to see, graphically. Is that what you are expecting to see, or do your graphic needs vary from that? If that is what you want, but are not getting, compare the display settings for Stairs in the active Display Representation in your drawing to the Stairs Plan Display Representation in the drawing that Doug posted, and adjust yours accordingly. If you want something different, you will need to describe it better (preferably graphically), and someone here may be able to advise how to achieve that (or come as close to that as possible).
In this set of tutorials, you'll learn how to draw a stair detail in AutoCAD. We'll begin the project by using Polylines to draw the basic form of the treads. Once we have the form in place we'll then draw the stringers and landing. We'll finish out the drawing by adding some handrails and balusters as well as text and dimensions. While working with our drawing we'll be sure to adhere to the code requirements which can be found in the International Building Code. By the end of this training, you'll have a solid understanding of what it takes to draw a professional looking and code compliant stair detail for your permit set of drawings. Software required: AutoCAD.
Pierre is a Pluralsight training pioneer. Since becoming the first CAD and BIM author at Digital-Tutors (now a Pluralsight company), Pierre has played a major role in building the training library. With a productive background in the CAD industry, working as everything from a drafter to project manager, Pierre has long had a passion for the creativity and hard work that goes into designing architectural projects.Pierre is proud to be able to share his mastery of Revit and AutoCAD with the P... moreluralsight community, and is driven by the desire to inspire others in the same way his instructors inspired him. Don't hesitate to put your CAD and BIM educational future in Pierre's capable hands. After all, he was a major contributor in designing the Digital-Tutors headquarters itself!
We will use floor plans, sections and pictures. The floor plans are drawn in AutoCAD, which we will exported to Maya. Elements which we will encounter are; Create polygon tool, planar, extrude, create curve, duplicate surface curve, attach curve, component mode
When using maya you will use a lot of different files, and a lot of files will be generated. To keep everything tidy (and effective) Maya works with a project structure. This means that a lot of subfolders are placed in a main folder, each for different types of files.It is always very important to set up your Maya project properly; failing to do this will result in frustrations later on.
When we look on the outside of the building, we see a variety of shapes from straight and sloped to curved. For each shape there is an optimal tool or working method. When working on bigger or more complex buildings you want to work as efficient as possible. So it is important to learn to use the right tool for the right job.
After rotating, and aligning it is wise to put each level in a separate layer. You do this by first making a new layer. Click on the 'create new layer' button in the upper right corner of your layer box. Choose a good name and color for your layer, in this case it is: 'level_1' and the color is dark blue. Select the lines, right click on the layer and choose 'add selected objects'
Now we have imported the plans we can use the lines to make polygons. This way we can make very accurate models, so that we don't have to bother about misaligned elements in our model. There are different tools in Maya to create polygons out of lines. The most important ones are explained in this tutorial.
With this tool you can simply draw a 2d polygon shape. This shape can be extruded to get the desired polygon. This tool is very handy for straight elements like walls.We will use it to make the straight walls in the first level.
Select the create polygon tool, by going to the mesh menu and then the polygon tool. Remember to set the option box in the status line to polygon, like displayed in the image, otherwise you will not find the mesh menu.
start to click counterclockwise on each of the editpoints. After clicking the last point you can hit the enter key to close the polygon. You should not try to close it by clicking again on the first point of your polygon.
Now we have a 2d polygon shape of the wall. To get the actual wall we have to extrude this shape with the extrude tool. Select the polygon and then go to Edit Mesh > Extrude. Now some new handles appear. Click and drag on the arrow for the y-direction so you extrude the face in positive direction. In the channelbox on the right of the screen you see that by dragging the extrusion you change the 'local translate Z' value. Adjust the value to the height you want. We choose 2.75 meters.
With this method we can make all the simple straight walls on the first level. Even some more complex forms are possible, as long as it is not curved. In the picture below you see some other wall elements of the ground floor.
The planar tool will create a planar between selected lines, the same as when using NURBS. Instead of choosing a NURBS surface we will create a polygon surface. But first we have to select the lines we want to use.
Select the lines of the piece of wall which has a curved angle. As you see in the picture, the lines have to make a closed region. They don't have to be joined, as long as they are all in one plane. If you miss some lines you can draw them with the curve tool and the snap option. To make selecting all the lines easier you can group them.
Now we see the option box. Because we want a round shape we choose a cubic degree. And the output geometry is Polygon. We have a lot of options for the tessellation, which tells the program how to make the planar. It is important to choose the right settings here because you can get very bad results with a lot of hard angles in it, or a smooth result with an unnecessary amount of faces. We choose standard fit. Copy the settings from the picture and apply. This will give us an satisfactory result. Play with the settings to understand them, so you can apply them to different shapes.
The entrance on the ground level exists out of a big round glass window. If we look closer to some pictures we see that the window exists out of a lot straight window segments. On the pictures it isn't clear how much there are exactly, so we have to make an estimate. On our imported cad drawing we just have two curved lines ( which together don't form an arc!). Combine the lines to get one line, by selecting them and go to Edit Curves > Attach Curves. Select the Option Box and make sure the Attach Method is set to Connect and Keep Originals is turned off. Click Attach. Now the two lines are one.
We have to give the glass a thickness, so we will offset the line by 0.05 units. Select the line and go to Edit Curves > Offset > Offset Curve and select the option box. Use a value of -0.05 in offset value. By using this value the line will offset to the outside.
We could attach 2 extra lines two close the region, and use the planar tool. But instead we will use the loft tool. A tool which most people associate with NURBS, but polygons can also be created with it. So select the two lines go to Surfaces > Loft and choose the option box. Set the output geometry to polygon. You'll see that the extra options are the same as with the Planar tool. Instead of standard fit we choose general this time. This is the best option because we want to have an uniform division of faces on our polygon. The u and v values are important. The u value will affect our division in the length. The V value will affect the division in thickness. So we set the V value to 1 and the U to 50. This means that we will get 50 faxes with according edge.
When we extrude the face we have a wall which looks round but is build up out of 50 faces, which will give a more realistic representation of the window in the model. The exact number of glass panels which is used for the window cannot be seen from the pictures we have, so we estimate 50.
The window is also in front of the entrance, we have to clear the entrance. We use a Boolean operation, the difference tool. Make a poly cube and drag it to the front wall elements which are part of the entrance. Drag the vertices in the compound mode to the right edge to get a nice result. Select the window poly and the cube and got to Mesh > Booleans > Difference. Now the entrance is free again.
Now we have to add the window frames. We see that the window has one horizontal line at about 1.20 m above the ground. To make this part of the window frame we repeat the steps of the window. First we make a new line on the outside of the window, with the offset tool.
Select the most outer line and offset it by 0.05 units. Also offset the inner line 0.05 units to the inside. Now we have 4 lines us the most inner and most outer line to loft. Use the same settings as for the window. Now extrude the faces to a height of 0.05 units. Place the poly on the appropriate height.