Staircase | Modeling Projects

In this video, we're going to be focusing on and learning how to create the staircase you see on the screen. Now, this staircase has been created using a variety of different tools and techniques that you'll learn inside of Shapr3D. Now, the first one is going to be creating a layout sketch. Then we're going to use some patterning techniques. Next, we're going to be using some rotational or rotating the geometry around. We're going to create some reference sketches based upon existing bodies as well as edges. And then we're going to be adjusting and modifying the design based upon the history. Visualization and applying some materials is yet another thing we're going to be learning about. And we're going to be jumping into that at the end of the video. Now, even if you're not creating a staircase or a model similar to this, we're going to be learning all kinds of different things you can apply to a variety of different projects. So to get started, let's go ahead and close this one down here. So let's go ahead. I'm going to bring the properties back over here. I'm going to switch back over here to show my items. Instead of the visualization mode, I'm going to go back to modeling. You can see how everything kind of looks from the beginning. And then I'm going to go ahead and start a new document just using Control-N. And there it is. Okay. So now we're starting from the beginning. First things first, I want to create a couple of planes, which are going to be my reference planes of where this thing is going to be in space. I'm not going to just create a staircase that's going to be flying around or just sitting in space, not connecting anything. Obviously, you need to connect this to a building. But I'm going to define that later on. So right now, let's go ahead and just go ahead and create a couple of references. So come down over here, and I'm going to go and I'm going to start a couple of things. So first things first, notice we've got all these different tools we've got down here. So you can go through all these different lists over here. You click on each one of these things. You've got the option to create a line, move, scale. Just want to point out where all these things are here. And we've got these construction things. So the first thing I want to do is create a construction plane. Click on that one right there. And I'm going to choose the bottom surface right here and click OK. Click on next and the offset. I don't want to make an offset at all. I just want to leave it right at the ground floor. But because you're creating this, if you later want to go and change the design, you can go back to the history and you can change and move that plane to move it up or down if needed. OK, click OK. And there it is. So plane one shows up over here. And if I right click on it, I can say rename. I'm going to call that floor. Let's do it one more time. This time, I want to create a wall or surface that I'm going to be drawing on. OK, so in this case, I'm going to go ahead and come down here again. I'm going to click on add construction plane. I'm going to choose this one right over here and click on next. I'm not going to offset again. Click on done. This time, I'm going to say this is a wall. So I'm going to right click on it, say rename and call wall wall. There it is. All right. So now we have everything we need to get started. So I want to start drawing on that wall. So here's my wall. And let's go over here and start a sketch. Click on sketch. And now you can see we're right in that mode. OK, so let's go ahead and zoom out a little bit and notice the grid's changing a little bit. And so it's point one inches right now. And if you zoom in, zoom out, you notice at some point in time, it's going to change those change over here. So I keep zooming out over here and I want to actually get out to one inch. So click on one inch here and I'm going to lock the grid size at one inch. So I'm always looking that I happen to be in the inch unit system. But of course, however you're designing, if you're in metric, that's fine. But for this example, we're going to be using inch. OK, and now I'm going to go ahead and create a line so I can hit I can come over here and click on L or click on the line. So I'm going to hit L on the keyboard. Start right there at the origin. Draw the line over here. I'm going to draw one up over here, snap here and then snap down here. OK, a couple of things I want to grab. If I grab this over here, notice I can move it around. I don't want that to happen. I want to lock that in place. Same thing over here. I want to be able to drag this in and out. So I'm clicking on that point and dragging it, making sure that's the functionality that I'm going to get. And that's exactly what I want. I can't push right or left. I can only go up and down. And that's exactly what I'm looking for. OK, now I need to define the height of the staircase. OK, so this is, of course, dependent upon how high you want to make your stairs. So right over here, if I click on this line, if I click in this box, let's try it again. Click over here, click on the box. I can type something in or if I double click and I can actually get this little box that pops over here. So your choice. I can just type in a value, say like 120. That's the number that I'm looking for here. And if I click on front over here, it's going to zoom out so I can come over here and get that zoomed out. So it's looking kind of how I want it. Right. Again, set it up on the screen. Look over here. I can drag it out. I can move it around. Click on back normal to the screen. And that's what I'm kind of looking for. Right. Something like like that. OK, now the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to move that over here and drag this back out over here. And now I've got that 120. Now, if that's not the value you want, you can also type in the value over here instead of typing it here, though. If you click, I can type in something and use this actually as a calculator. So I can say something like 104.625. That happens to be the length of standard 625 is a standard pre-cut stud. Maybe have a top plate or bottom plate in your design. So you're going to go add like three inches in for that. You're going to add in one point five inches for the the other two by four and maybe have a joist or something like that. You can add something like a 16 inch in there. How about the flooring at the top? Point seven five. Once you have all that stuff in that list here, hit enter. It's going to add all that up for you. That's your final value, right? So you can get a value like that. Now, for this example, I want to go back to that 120 just to make the math a little bit easier, but you can figure out whatever that's going to be in your own design. So let's go ahead, click on this again. I'm going to say 120. And that's where we're at. OK, now keep in mind, we also have this. We can still move it out. Now I want to go ahead and design my very first tread. So I'm going to zoom in right up here at this level over here, move it over here, zoom in right over here. All right. So that's where I'm going to be at. I'm going to hit R on the keyboard for rectangle, right? So I'm going to drag out a rectangle. Here's my rectangle. And I'm going to make 1.5 as the height. Hit tab. I'm going to make 11.5 as the tread length, right? Hit tab and hit enter. OK, so there is my tread. Now, the reason I chose those numbers is because that's exactly the size of a two by twelve in the States. Now, if your material is different, of course, make whatever thing you want. And you don't have to make this out of wood either. It could be metal or whatever material you happen to be using. It doesn't really matter as long as you define whatever that tread is going to be. Now, I also don't want this line to actually stop right over here. So I'm going to click on that line and hit delete. I don't want that guy there. All right. What I want is that that first tread to come all the way down to here. So I'm going to click on line. I'm going to grab that top point here and snap. OK, and then zoom back over here. Make sure we got the right point. Looks pretty good. All right. Now I'm going to go ahead and define that next tread. So I'm going to use the rectangle command one more time. Click on this on the actual line, right? So the front's going to be the same and then click. And then I'm going to hit escape. And I'm going to say, hey, this line over here, I'm going to hold down shift on the keyboard here and go ahead and select that one over there. I'm going to say, hey, these guys are equal, right? They're the same length. Same thing over here. I'm going to say the top of that one and I'm going to hold down shift again and say, hey, these guys are equal as well. And now that second tread you can see here, if I click on it, I can drag it, drag it around. And notice it's rotating a little bit. We don't want that, right? Something's wrong there. We don't want that. So we want to click on that top line and say, hey, this is actually going to be horizontal, right? Same thing up here. Let's make sure we're locking these things down so it's horizontal. Now, if I click on it, I should be able to drag it around and define where that second tread is going to be, right? Now we're going to focus on nosing, right? So that's how far this tread sticks over that tread over there. So I can define that by just clicking on like a line here, like the front of that, that first tread, hold down shift, select that second tread and notice it pops up a little box here. So I don't want 1.5. I actually just want one inch. So I'm going to define the nosing or how much is sticking over by one inch. And notice that also changes where this line is. So now this is defined by the length of the tread and then the height, but notice we haven't defined the height, right? So we can still move this up and down, right? So if you don't know what's going on here, or you don't know where we're constrained, grab it and try to move it around and see what's going on. So in this case, I want to define how high each tread is. So a rule of thumb for doing that is to take whatever measurement of the height of the staircase and divide that by 7.5. 7.5 is about kind of the average step from one step to the next, right? And that'll tell you how many treads you're going to have. So in this case, we're going to have 16. So I'm going to take 120, divide it by 7.5, happens to be exactly 16. I kind of picked that number to make it easy for us here. But if your number is a more complicated number, that's fine. Whatever that's going to be, it doesn't matter. We're just going to go ahead and define it right here. So I'm going to choose the top of this tread here. Hold down shift, top of that tread right there. Notice it already happens to be 7.5. Perfect. But if it didn't type over here, hit enter. And now I've defined that. So now that whole tread is ready to go. Okay. Hit escape. I'm out of that. I'm going to rotate this around a little bit. So I'm looking kind of at the side of it. And you can do that by holding down shift, by the way, and just kind of rotating your middle or holding on your middle mouse button. Notice I'm getting a little bit of weird, weird motion there. So I like to sometimes make, keep a horizontal, the horizon level here. You can turn that on or off your choice. You can also change a couple other things over here as far as how you want to look at things as far as the views. Okay. Now I want to click on just that first tread. I want to drag that tread out, right? So that's going to be my first tread. I happen to be using 48 inches. Hit enter on your keyboard. And now you can see there is what I got, right? So there's my very first tread. Pretty nice. Now, what I want to do is I want to define the rest of the treads and we want to make a pattern for that. So to make the pattern, we really want to be able to see that original sketch. Notice here's our sketch over here and it's turned off or it's hidden. So I turn that back on. Now I can see where it is and I can define what the length is. The problem is, is I don't know how far it is from this point down to that point, right? So you could come measure it if you wanted to, or you can go back and jump into that sketch and I can define a measurement, right? So I could say, Hey, let's go click on normal to that again and come over here. I'm going to choose that point right there. Hold down shift, pick up that point right there. And notice my measurement is 12.9035, right? So that is the length from one tread at a diagonal from one to the next. So 90.35. Let's go ahead and just write that down somewhere else. So I'm going to say, all right, 12.9035 just on a little notepad here. And now I'm ready to go. Okay. So back over here, we're looking at this in 3d at this time, right? We've got the length. Now what I want to do is create a pattern. So here I come down here, go down to transform, and I want to go to pattern, click on pattern. And what I want to pattern this thing right here, this body, that's the body I want to pattern. And I don't want to just go in a rectangular fashion, right? I actually want to go at this diagonal angle here, right? So how am I going to do that? So I'm going to hold down shift a little bit and middle mouse button. So I can rotate this around a little bit. Now grab that little center point. I'm going to drag it over till I actually get to that line. So notice I shouldn't like get on that line. It changes the arrows, right? So go away, come back to the line and bam, right? So now that pattern is following that sketch line because I have the sketch one shown right now. Okay. Now, if I grab the arrow, I can drag this down and notice I define whatever that length is by spacing. I want to use that number 12.9035, right? That's my, that's my spacing from one to the next. Now the quantities, if I hit tab, it's going to go over here to quantity. I'm going to put 16, right? And hit enter. And that's all I need to do. Click on the green check or the blue checkbox. And there it is. So there are my stairs from top to bottom, pretty straightforward. Now, because we've got the sketch shown, let's go ahead and just kind of hide that right now. We don't want to see all that. So there is a pretty straightforward and simple set of stairs. But what if you wanted to rotate them? What if you wanted this to kind of break somewhere in the middle here and go off in a different direction? Well, that's fine. So let's go ahead and look over here what we have. So as far as the linear pattern one, if I click down here, I can see here are the different bodies that make that up, right? So I'm going to choose which steps I want to rotate around. So I'm going to hold down shift and I'm going to go ahead and just select a bunch of these steps, right? That looks like a good amount. It doesn't matter how many you want to choose. It's your design. However you want to rotate it is fine. Okay. So those are the ones I want to rotate. Now I want to come down here and I want to create a rotation, right, on this thing. So I accidentally clicked off of there. Let's go ahead and select those guys one more time. All right. So click, click, click, click, click. Okay. We want to do a rotation, right? So move or rotate. Actually, no. More. Down here, we want to rotate around axis. That's what we want to do. Click on rotate around axis. And the axis I want to rotate around is going to be this little corner of this tread. So I'm going to zoom in right there, grab that little corner there, and then zoom back out. And you can see if I click on this little arrow here, I can drag and rotate this around and I get right to 90 degrees, click okay. And there we have it, right? So there are treads and they're looking pretty good. Now I need a landing there, right? So I come into the first steps and then I need a landing here. Then I turn and go back up these other steps over here. So that landing pretty much wants to be right at the top of this tread, right? So we're going to use the top of that tread as our drawing board. Click on that and click on sketch. It's going to spin around. So we're looking directly at that, right? And I want to use a rectangle. So click on a rectangle. I want to use this corner over here. So I'm going to snap to that corner and I'm going to come right over here and I want to make sure that I'm snapping over here. Now I want to snap to the back edge, right? So I'm going to snap there, but notice I'm a little bit far on the side over here. That's okay. Hit escape and then drag that. And so now without any dimensions at all, I snapped to this corner, I snapped to that corner. That's all I need. Let's go ahead and extrude it. Let's go ahead and hit E on the keyboard. That's going to allow us to get into the kind of extrude mode here. And notice I can click on this and click or drag it up or down, right? So I'm going to drag this down four inches, click okay, right? So there's my landing looking pretty good, right? So now I'm making four inches. That might be like a four by four. That might be some other material. I'm not sure you might, if you're making that up four by four, you might be make three and a half. It doesn't really matter. Some distance is all you need for that landing. Now, what I want to do is I want to draw on the bottom of the landing, right? So that's the face I want to draw on over here, but I don't want to look at all this other stuff. So I'm going to hide some of this other stuff. Just turn it off. Here's that linear pattern. Just hide it for right now. Click on the bottom there. And I want to create a sketch. So I'm looking at the bottom here. So hit the R key for rectangle. And I want to click on that bottom corner there. And before you click and place the rectangle, notice it shows up as an active little input box. So click on 3.5 and hit tab and click on 3.5 again, and then hit enter. And then that's my first little square over there. Do the same thing over here. 3.5 right there. 3.5 tab, 3.5 enter. Same thing on the top right corner here. Drag it out. All right. 3.5 tab, 3.5. You're getting the picture here, right? So last one here. And again, I'm referencing that corner, right? So 3.5 and tab and 3.5. Okay. And there are my four little squares in the corners. Okay. Now escape out of that. And then you can hit extrude again, right? So I want to extrude. That corner, that corner, this corner, and this corner. Those are all the ones that I want to extrude out. And if I spin my model around a little bit, I want to extrude it down a direction, right? Well, where do I want to go? So I could say, hey, let's just make some little feet, right? That's fine. Right. And you can just type in the value or you can measure the value, but let's just drag it down an arbitrary amount right now and click on okay. All right. Now over here in the history bar, notice here's that extrusion, right? And if you click on the drop of the twirl down here, so it's notice that the, uh, the distance is my extent, but I can also switch to an object, right? So an object and the object I want to bring it down to is the floor. Here's the floor. We created that the very first thing. That's why I created that original, that plane, because I can just extrude down to it, right? Click on that and bam. It's going to allow me to bring that down, uh, as my selection, but, uh, over here, let's escape out of that. So here's my extrusion. I'm twirling down to it. I need to go ahead and click on select first. So up to object select, what I'm going to go down to is going to be the floor, right? Notice that it updates the model, click okay, or done, right? And so now that's bringing that all the way down. So if we were to choose a different, uh, skit, a stair for something like that, that's fine, right? Because it's always just going to bring it all the way down to the floor, right? So it makes it a little bit more robust of a design. And same thing over here is far as the union, right? I want, actually, I don't want this to be all one body. I want to make it a new body, right? So these are all going to be four individual bodies, which are going to be like four by fours on the corner of this, this little platform here. So that's what I'm, that's why I can always go back to this little history bar and go back and modify and adjust things as needed. Now let's go ahead and bring back all of those other stairs. So as soon as I click on that there, I can spin that around now. And now I've got my, my first set of stairs, the landing more stairs this way here. But of course these stairs can't just be floating in space, right? I need to create some type of a stinger, something that's going to amount all these stairs to where they're going to be. Now I want to create some, what's called a reference geometry. I'm going to, I'm going to use where the stairs happen to be right now to create the shape that I'm looking for. Okay. So right over here, let's go ahead and choose like this first step and click on sketch. It spins it around. And now I'm looking right at the edge of the steps here and I'm going to jump into the line command. My very first line, I'm just going to click on the end point here, just bring it up, snap, snap, bring it down right over here. I'm going to snap it over here and then come down all the way to where the stairs are. Right. And I'm going to make sure that I'm snapping to where the side of the stairs are. And then of course, snap over here to the bottom of that step. And I'm just going to keep doing this little kind of zigzag motion all the way up. And you know, sometimes you might miss click here. It's pretty easy to do, but make sure you're kind of getting that purple line saying that is vertical and you are getting a snap right to where you're trying to go. So I'm going to snap there, snap there. I'm going to snap there, there. And of course, we can speed this up if we wanted to. But if you have a hundred stairs, you might be here for a while. Luckily we have a fairly short staircase, but you can see here as I'm getting back up to the shape, boom, now I've created one enclosed boundary, right? So my stairs go all the way to the top, all the way to the bottom. Now we need a couple other things. So let's go back into the line command. I'm going to snap a line from over here. Let's see. Let's zoom in a little bit and let's see if I can click here and I can snap down here. So there's my line and I'm going to say, Hey, this line here actually is going to be a construction line. So I'm going to use this line here and say, make construction. Right? So now I've just got this line. And what I want to do is I want to make sure this line is defining the shape. So I'm going to click on that line there. I'm going to hold down shift and select this line here. I'm going to say, Hey, these two guys, they're parallel, right? That's one piece of wood that's gonna be made out of this thing. And then I need to define the length between or the width of this. And look, notice over here, I've got this value here. I can go in here and click on there. And I want this to be 11.5, which happens to be the width of a two by 12 click. Okay. And now I've defined that width, right? So that's the widest it can be. And those are the little steps you're gonna have to cut out of that piece of two by 12. Okay. Once that all looks pretty good right now, I'm going to exit out of that. I'm going to spin it around. So I'm looking at it and now I'm going to choose that boundary, right? I'm going to drag that onto 3d space and the length I want to go is 1.5, right? Oh, something got, something got messed up there. Hold on. Click on this. Let's just try that. Try that one more time. Okay. Exit out of the sketch. Here's my sketch that I just created, right? And I want to go in and create an extrude. So here's my extrude. I want to drag it out. I'm going to type in 1.5 and I want to make sure that I'm not creating a subtraction. I want to create a new body, right? Somehow I got to turn to 1.5. There it is. And then click on. Okay. Well, somehow or another, it's still kept the nine inches, right? That's not what we wanted, but guess what? We've got this history bar over here, right? So click on the history bar down here. As far as the distance, right? I don't want nine inches, right? For some reason, it really wanted me to be negative nine inches, but I can go back over here and type in negative 1.5 and fix the model back to where we were and it saves the day, right? So now we're back to what exactly I want, right? So there's my first stinger and now we want to pattern it, right? So here's my pattern. I want to choose this body here. Body 22 is the one we want to pattern and come down here. So we click on pattern, right? And I want to pattern at this direction here. So I got three of them and the, you know, obviously you're going to have to do a little bit of math here depending on the width you're going to need. So in this case, it's 23.25 inches to get it perfect. And you want three, click okay. And there you have it. But again, somehow or another, it must, it must've picked up the wrong value. So go back again. That's why we have this history bar, right? And my spacing, that negative 23.25, go back and fix it. We can fix it right there in the history bar, which makes that really handy, right? Because of course, if you, if you click on the wrong thing in the model or you accidentally hit escape or something like that, having that history bar really will save the day and makes it really nice to be able to go back and fix the model, right? Because you're never going to model everything perfect, right? You're going to always have to go back and change it around a little bit. Same thing. Okay. So once we've got that first set of stairs up here, let's do the same thing over here, right? I'm going to choose this side over here. Go ahead and create a sketch, spin it around, and I'm going to do exactly the same thing over here. So I'm going to create a line, click on the line, and I'm going to snap from here to here, snap over to here, snap somewhere over here. This time I'm going to go all the way down to the ground, right? So the ground happens to be right over here. If I click on that point and I drag it out, it gives me like a little helper line. Check that out. And then go back over here and snap back to the bottom of that leg. And I want to, I want to turn that little line into a construction line. So here's what he's just helping us out, making sure that the bottom of our stairs actually is going to be at the floor, right? So then let's go back over here, grab the line command again. I'm going to, of course, snap. Let's make sure we got that right. So click on that again, snap there, come over here, snap. And we want to make sure we're one inch off that nosing. We have to come back and change that. But go ahead and just start snapping to the stairs as you go, right? So come over here, come up here. And, you know, what's cool about this is you're referencing all this geometry, right? So if those stairs move, right, you're not putting any values in. There's no hard typed in dimensions at this point, right? You're just snapping to the bottom of wherever that stair happens to be, right? So it allows it to be a dynamic model and update as needed. Okay. Same thing over here, create the line, snap from here to here, right? I'm going to turn that line into a construction line, right? And I want to make that line, this one here, and hold down shift, this guy down here, again, they're going to be parallel. And then I want to create a dimension from this guy over to this line over here. And that's going to be our 11.5 inches. 11.5. There it is. Okay. For some reason, this is doing something weird for me. I'm not sure exactly why. It's giving me, maybe it's doing some math. 11.5. Okay. All right. So there it is. Okay. So now we've got the right value in here. And now the last thing we want to do is come down here and make sure that we put the value here. So I've got a line here, hold down shift, this line over here, and instead of 1.5, it's type one inch and bam. Now, if you made any errors during this process, if you didn't click or snap to each one of these lines and like that, that's okay. Right? We can always come back and modify and get the shape that we're looking for. If we made any changes or if we made any mistakes, right? But once you're done hit escape, and now we've got that same shape we had before. It looks pretty good. And of course, I'm going to go and choose that shape, drag that one out. I'm going to type in 1.5 and click. Okay. This time it worked perfectly. Magic, magic. And then this time I want to pattern it again, right? So I'm here and I'm going to say, Hey, let's jump into the pattern command, right? And I want to drag it out. Wait, make sure we're choosing the body. Here's the body. Try it again, that body and come down here to the pattern, choose a pattern, drag it out. There it is. And 23.25 should still be the number. Okay. Tab three inches or three instances of it. And that looks good. Okay. And now we have so there are stairs. Now, of course, these stairs are just not attached to anything yet, right? So you're going to go build the rest of the building, but that's a little bit too much scope for this video we have right here. So of course, imagine you've got a wall here or some second story here in a design. Of course, we're going to need some type of railings and to finish this thing off. So there's a lot of different things we're going to have to add onto that. And we're going to be focusing on some of those things in future videos. But for right now, we've learned quite a bit, we've learned how to pattern, how to use some reference geometry, how to create things based upon other things and have it being dynamic, right? So it's a very powerful model that we've created here. And these skills and techniques can be used for a variety of different types of designs, right? But before we finish up, I want to add some visualization. I want this thing to look good. We want to make it out of wood right now, right? Or you can make it out of metal. I mean, if this is it's designed right now, wood, but I mean, these same techniques could be easily used for creating this out of metal, right? But first things first, let's go over and do some visualization, right? So if you click on this little icon up here, it says modeling, I can go down to visualization. And now I'm in the visualization mode. And now I can drag and drop materials. So here's my materials. And I can drag them if I just drag something like an ABS glossy over to a part. And it looks great. Here it is shows up in this red, it's plastic, but you probably don't want to make a plastic staircase, right? So you probably want to go down here and let's look at something instead of all materials, I'm going to choose wood. And down here, as far as the type of wood, probably going to make this out of something like a Douglas fir. So here's Douglas fir board. Now you can drag that over here and apply it to one individual body, right? That's fine. Or you can go over here and says all items, instead of all items, I want to click on bodies, right? I can choose the top here. And I can hold down shift and select all these like everybody here. That's fine. I can just say, Hey, let's change that. And I want them all to be Doug for boom. And now I've applied that material to all of those individual shapes. And that's as easy it is right now. I can go over here and say, Hey, like let's make an environment and say, Hey, how about the, how about this black environment or, or this colored water, you know, click on any of these environments to get those different shapes or different looks you might be looking for on your staircase. So I think that's the one I use from my example. So now we have that finished up. We've got a nice set of stairs, and now we can move on to the next part of the process of probably creating the railings or finishing it off or something like that. But that is it for this tutorial. Hopefully you liked it. Hopefully you learned something and you know, the, the power of shaper 3d is really having the ability to connect, you know, one sketch to another sketch or to another body and create creating that, or using that history as well. So you can go back and modify and use that information that's in your model to create a robust structure that you can use in a variety of different applications.