Steve wrote:
TomWaltz wrote:
Profiler won't do this. It is only for "flat" objects. It cannot go upward like a stair railing would need to.... unless you mean the CADImage 3D Profiler? Even that would be pretty difficult to curve around in plan like the example shows.
Do I need to post the pictures again? go the the link and see for your self. I can make an oval hand rail that comes down the stair, turns the corner and goes on down.
I looked at your link, and it did not seem to apply to Cedric's actual situation. There is a huge difference between the pair of straight-run stairs you show and the spiral stair shown in Cedric's example. The question was not how to do an oval-profile handrail, but an how to put a handrail on an oval-shaped stair (as shown in the example plan).
True, you technically CAN do some sloping elements with Profiler, if you have a lot of time to spend on doing it. Cedric said he was interested in time, and if Stairmaker was not productive for this in the past, I'm betting the "can be done with substantial effort and zero ability to be edited without repeating the process from the top" won't be too time-effective either.
There is a difference between "can be done" and "can be done quickly." I think Peter's Mesh method would be probably not be much faster in the beginning but will have the ability to be quickly edited later if/when the need arose. That can carry a lot of weight, since the whole point of CAD should be the ability to make quick revisions, not to start over from scratch any time a change is made. At some point, should we at least TRY to be efficient? At some point, in some situation, is the model so inefficient that it's faster to just draw something in 2D?
I think the CADImage 3D profiler might work well for this too, but I could not say for sure. I've used it a lot, but not for this kind of oval-plan condition. It can be a little tricky sometimes, and may cause more problems than it solves.
Tom Waltz
