Featuring a precisely modeled railing in your project is not only satisfying but also a professional design feat. Our Railing tool aims to serve multiple scenarios and styles, which increases its complexity. Read along to leverage the capabilities of this essential Archicad tool and streamline your modeling process in your next projects!
Our Tip of June was a collaborative effort, with contributions by @AllanP and @Lingwisyer through nice step-by-step tutorials, and additional insights from @MitchD and our moderator @Barry Kelly.
Before we get started: remember to ‘Favorite’
Use Favorites to save and apply Railing settings configurations that you use frequently.
Favorites are saved with your project file and can be imported/exported between projects. Access and apply Favorites directly from the Railing Default Settings Dialog:
@Lingwisyer suggests having an empty railing saved as a Favorite as well for a quick start when creating a new model.
Now, let’s dive into the tutorials!
Railing A: horizontal cable runs
In the International template, you may start with the Favorite “Wired Railing”. Using the symbols ‘+’ and ‘-’, add or remove elements as necessary:
Set the height of each cable element, adjust the thickness, profile, and material accordingly:
Likewise, set Inner Posts for intermediate spacing – dimensions, profile, material, etc. If you toggle on the Equally Distribute Pattern (max. length) option in the Segment settings, then you can set the optimal spacing of the intermediate posts:
Set the end posts for corners. You can also set Ends settings to control how far past the last post the Toprail will project.
Adjust the fixing of the Toprail:
To achieve a realistic detail in the corners, set up Connections for the rails:
Finally, adjust the position and height of the whole railing and fixing solution at the bottom:
Result:
Railing B: wall mounted handrail with brackets
For such cases, we will simply use a Handrail with wall fixing:
The fixing distribution settings can be customized in a dedicated tab. In this case, our Railing does not contain any posts, therefore we should use either the distribution by number of divisions or by pattern (pre-defined distance).
Result:
Thank you @AllanP and @Lingwisyer for contributing to the Community with these descriptive step-by-step guides. The content above is based on two forum threads initiated by Marc H and CPGQ.
See you next month with another technical tip!
Graphisoft Community Team
