Stairs preview picture

[Anonymous]

Hey guys

I know how to create preview pictures for the objects but i don't know how to do it for the stairs.

The stairs that came with archicad's library have them so it should be possible right?

thanks in advance.

Luis

[Laszlo Nagy]

There are two different kind of Stairs.
1. The Stairs that you see in the Stair Settings Dialog. These were created in ARCHICAD's Library Editor Environment, where you can set and save a Preview Picture with them.
2. The Stairs created using StairMaker. When you click the "Create Stair" command in the Info Box or the Stair Settings Dialog, StairMaker is started and you can create and configure various types of Stairs there. However, there is now Preview Picture creation possibility in that environment and this is why you can't set a Preview Picture there.
As you may know StairMaker is a very old Add-On which has not seen much development in recent years. And originally when it was developed by a third party (later its was purchased from him by GRAPHISOFT) preview picture creation capabilities were not included in it and it just stayed that way during the years.

To be a bit technical: a StairMaker Stair has a different GDL Subtype from the GDL Subtype of normal Stairs, this is how ARCHICAD knows whether a Stair should be opened for editing in the Library Part Editor or StairMaker.
As far as I know you can't open in the Library Editor a Stair created by StairMaker to create Preview Picture for it.

[Anonymous]

Hey laszlonagy

Thanks for your reply and explanations.

On a personal note do u make stairs using coding or do u also do it through stairmaker?

Luis

[Laszlo Nagy]

In our multi-apartment residential design work we never really had very complex Stairs, most our our stairs were simple U-stairs or 3-flight Stairs, so I have actually always managed to solve those with the Stairs available in StairMaker. For each project we just created the project-specific Stairs in StairMaker. I actually always created wese stairs with their structure only, without the treads, and we drew the treads in Section where applicable.